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THE MARVELS 


OF 


Our Bodily Dwelling 


PHYSIOLOGY MADE INTERESTING 

Suitable as a Text-book or Reference Book in Schools, 
or for Pleasant Home Reading 


By MARY WOOD-ALLEN, M. D. 

Author of “Teaching Truth,” “Child-Confidence Rewarded,” 
“Almost a Man,” and joint author of “The Man 
Wonderful in the House Beautiful.” 



PUBLISHED BY 


THE WOOD-ALLEN PUBLISHING CO. 
Ann Arbor, Michigan 

1896 







Copyrighted 1895, 

By MARY WOOD-ALLEN. 


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PREFACE. 


M ENS sana in corpore sano,” is a sentence with 
which we were familiar forty years ago. 
We repeated it glibly in the original and could 
translate it into equivalent English, ‘ ‘ A sound 
mind in a sound body,” but had little compre¬ 
hension of its full import which even now is but 
beginning to dawn upon the world. Illnesses 
were then considered dispensations of Provi¬ 
dence ; we are now coming to see that we are 
responsible not only for our own vigor but for 
that of coming generations. Thus the practical 
value of physiology is recognized, and nearly 
every State in the union has passed a law com¬ 
pelling its study in the public schools. To make 
it interesting, therefore, is worthy the attention 
of educators. 

Teaching by metaphor, parable, and allegory 
has been the method of many of the wisest 
teachers. It is said of Jesus that “without a 
parable spake he not unto them,” so we may 
hold it as not beneath the dignity of instructors 
of to-day to use the same manner of presenting 
the truth. 



4 


■ OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


No one can claim originality in comparing the 
body to a house,for that comparison is as old as 
literature. Ecclesiastes refers to * ‘ the day when 
the keepers of the house shall tremble and those 
that look out of the windows be darkened and 
the door shall be shut in the streets. ” Abernethy 
uses a homely figure when he says, ‘ ‘ The kitchen 
— that is, your stomach — being out of order, 
the garret — the head — cannot be right, and 
every room in the house becomes affected. 
Remedy the evil in the kitchen, and all will be 
right in parlor and chamber.” 

We quote from Tennyson’s ‘ ‘ Deserted House : ” 

“ Life and Thought have gone away 
Side by side, 

Leaving door and windows wide ; 

Careless tenants they. 

“ All within is dark as night : 

In the windows is no light; 

And no murmur at the door, 

So frequent on its hinge before.” 

The author in this volume has united meta¬ 
phor with scientific facts, and even in this she 
cannot claim originality. Early in the pres¬ 
ent century Alcott wrote of “ The House We 
Live In,” and later writers on physiology have 
followed in his footsteps. But the simile is still 



PREFACE. 


5 


of interest to the juvenile mind and, as science 
is ever making discoveries, there is a demand 
for new and interesting works on physiology. 

The author would be glad to acknowledge all 
sources of information but that would be an 
almost endless task. She has laid under con¬ 
tribution the latest scientific authorities and be¬ 
lieves that this book will be found abreast of the 
science of to-day, holding ever to truth as it now 
presents itself, and never sacrificing facts to the 
allegory. 

The book is intended for home use or as a 
supplementary reader, text-book, Or reference 
book in schools. 

With thanks to the friends whose words of ap¬ 
preciation have given her encouragement, and to 
the dear daughter whose quick intelligence and 
willing fingers have ever been at her command, 
the author presents this book to the public with 
the prayerful hope that it may awaken a deep 
and living interest in this marvelous mansion, 
stimulating to such study of and obedience to the 
laws of physiology as will insure that sound body 
which is the beautiful dwelling-place of a sound 
mind. Mary Wood-Allen. 

Ann Arbor , Mich., Oct. 19, 1894. 



now thy Creator in the days 
of thy youth, while the evil 
days come not, nor the years draw nigh, 
when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in 
them; while the sun, or the light, or the 
moon, or the stars, he not darkened, nor the 
clouds return after the rain* In the day when 
the keepers of the house shall tremble, and 
the strong men shall bow themselves, and 
the grinders cease because they are few, and 
those that look out of the windows be 
darkened, and the doors shall be shut in the 
streets, when the sound of the grinding is 
low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the 
bird, and all the daughters of musick shall 
be brought low* Also when they shall be 
afraid of that which is high, and fears shall 
be in the way, and the almond tree shall 
flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a bur¬ 
den, and desire shall fail: because man goeth 
to his long home, and the mourners go about 
the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, 
or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher 
be broken at the fountain, or the wheel 
broken at the cistern* Then shall the dust 
return to the earth as it was: and the spirit 
shall return unto God who gave it* 

Eccl. 12: J-7* 




TABLE OF CONTENTS. 


PART I. 


CHAPTER I. 

Introductory .... 

CHAPTER II. 

The Framework .... 

CHAPTER III. 

The Walls and Machinery 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Plumbing .... 

CHAPTER V. 

The Sheathing .... 

CHAPTER VI. 

The Thatch .... 

CHAPTER VII. 

The Upper Story, or Cupola 

CHAPTER VIII. 

The General Office . 


PAGE. 

13 


17 


• 23 


• 33 


38 


4i 


• 43 

• 47 




8 


TABLE OF CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER IX. 

The Reception Room and Hall 

CHAPTER X. 

The Kitchen . 

CHAPTER XI. 

The Store Room 

CHAPTER XII. 

The Dining Room . . . 

CHAPTER XIII. 


The Force Pump 


CHAPTER XIV. 

The General Manager 

CHAPTER XV. 


The Servants ..... 

CHAPTER XVI. 

The Purifying Apparatus . 

CHAPTER XVII. 

The Heating Apparatus 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
The Laboratory, Manufactory, and 
House 


CHAPTER XIX. 

The Housekeeper’s Closets 


. 50 

. 56 

. 61 

. 63 

69 

• 75 

. . 80 

. 85 

. 97 

STORE- 

103 


. 108 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 


9 


CHAPTER XX. 

The Electrical Apparatus . . . .114 

CHAPTER XXI. 

The Wonderful Clock ..... 122 

CHAPTER XXII. 

Regulator and Mainspring . . . . 126 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

Special Watchmen ...... 132 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

The Windows ....... 140 

CHAPTER XXV. 

The Photographic Camera .... 143 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

The Music Room ...... 158 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

The Orchestrion.165 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

The Library ..172 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

The Picture Gallery.182 

CHAPTER XXX. 

The Chamber of Peace ..... 185 



10 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 


PART II. 


CHAPTER I. 

Helpful Guests 

CHAPTER II. 

Spicy Visitors .... 

CHAPTER III. 

Questionable Guests 


CHAPTER IV. 

Treacherous Companions . 

CHAPTER V. 

A Deceitful Friend . 

CHAPTER VI. 


• i93 

. 202 

. 207 

. 214 

. 220 


The Foe of the Household 


243 




PART 1. 























































































































# 



% 


The Taj Mahal. 

























A Supplementary chapter, entitled “The 
Birth-chamber,” can be obtained by sending 
ten cents .in stamps to the publishers,— 

The Wood-Allen Publishing Co., 

Ann Arbor, Mich. 



* 











i; OS 1 










•* 





















CHAPTER I. 


INTRODUCTORY. 

A GREAT many, many years ago, people 
thought they could see each other and — 
you think we see each other now, do you, Mas¬ 
ter Know-all ? You will probably be surprised 
when I tell you that you never saw any one in 
your life, and no one ever saw you. How do 
we know each other then, you ask ? — Why, by 
our houses, of course. We see a light in the 
window, or hear a voice from the open door, and 
know that the person is at home, but we never 
see him. Another strange thing is that our 
houses are all built after the same plan, have 
each just so many rooms, arranged in just the 
same order, with just the same number of doors 
and windows. You shake your head as if you 
scarcely believed me, but I assure you I am tell¬ 
ing you only the truth. The real, thinking, 
enjoying, knowing you , is shut up, a prisoner in 
his house, and will never go out of it as long as 
you live. 

You entered this house when it was very 
small, and found yourself a prisoner in it. I 

[i3] 


14 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


fancy you did not like it very well, for you 
cried out for help, and a good fairy named Aura 
rushed into your house and took possession of 
one of the empty rooms, and has made her home 
there ever since, and with Aura came the gift of 
earthly life. May be you will better understand 
me if I tell you that Aura is the Latin name 
for air. 

Have you ever taken much interest in learning 
about your body and how to keep it in good re¬ 
pair ? If a man builds a house of brick or stone, 
he is interested in keeping it in order ; he insures 
it against fire, and if the roof leaks or a window is 
broken, he does not think it an evidence of good 
sense to be indifferent, but he calls the roofer or 
glazier at once to repair damages. And yet he 
could pull this house down and rebuild it, he 
could sell it or give it away, or he could move 
out and leave it to take up his abode in another 
dwelling; but he can never have but one bodily 
house, and this he cannot sell nor give away. 
He can tear it down, but he cannot rebuild it, 
and when he moves out and leaves it, he is done 
with earthly life. It is, therefore, very impor¬ 
tant that he should study this house and its 
needs, so that he may know how to keep it in 
repair for many years of happy, useful occu¬ 
pancy. 



INTRODUCTORY. 


15 


Let us study the body as a house in which we 
dwell here on earth, a house created by a divine 
Architect, fitted up with every comfort, divided 
into many rooms, each with its own appropriate 
furniture and adapted to its own especial use. 
It is a beautiful building, more exquisitely 
adorned than any structure of man’s creation. 

In India is a wonderful building called the Taj 
Mahal, and people journey from the farthest 
parts of the earth to gaze with admiring awe 
upon its magnificence. It took twenty thousand 
workmen seventeen years to build it, and it is 
said to have cost fifty millions of dollars. Still, 
after all, it is only a tomb, erected by the Em¬ 
peror Shah Jehan in memory of the Empress 
Mumtazi Mahal, his beautiful, cultured, and be¬ 
loved wife. 

But your bodily house is more marvelous and 
beautiful than the Taj Mahal. Its design is 
more wonderful and complicated, its decorations 
more exquisite, its value far greater. Then, too, 
it is not a tomb, not a useless monument to a 
dead empress, but it is the abode of an immortal 
being in which he finds shelter ; it is a workshop 
where he carries on many wonderful processes; 
it is a tool through which he becomes acquainted 
with the outside world and by means of which he 
accomplishes great results. As man is able to 



16 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 

carry out the projects which his mind conceives 
only through the use of his bodily forces, it be¬ 
hooves him to learn its powers, cultivate its 
organs, study its laws, and reverence its Creator. 



f 





CHAPTER II. 


THE FRAME-WORK. 

D ID you ever see a house walk ? I saw one 
moving along the street the other day, but it 
was not going very fast. An old colored man, 
who was once asked how he was progressing on 
his heavenward way, replied that he was ‘ ‘ inch¬ 
ing along.” That was the way this house pro¬ 
gressed, although there were ropes and wheels 
and boards and rollers and a man and a horse to 
assist it. Our bodily house is four stories high, 
but by means of mechanical contrivances it can 
walk, or run, or turn hand-springs, or climb 
trees, or dive into the water, or turn itself up¬ 
side down and stand on the upper story. 

About two hundred pieces of a material called 
bone are united to form the frame-work of the 
house, and these pieces are long, short, flat, or 
irregular in shape, and when all are fastened to¬ 
gether, they form what is called the “skeleton.” 
You know that boards are united by splicing, 
dove-tailing, or mortising, or by means of con¬ 
trivances that hold them close together, and yet 

[ l 7] 


2 


18 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


permit easy motion between them. We find the 
same methods of union in the frame-work of the 
bodily house. The dome of the topmost story 
is formed of many pieces of bone united by dove¬ 
tailing or by splicing, which allows the dome to 
expand and grow. The third story, called the 
thorax, has a frame-work of curved beams which 
we commonly speak of as the ribs. They are 
attached to the spine in the back (of this we 
shall speak presently), and the upper seven of 
them on each side are fastened to a bone in 
front known as the sternum, or breast bone. 
From the thorax rises the short tower of the 
neck, which supports the upper story or head. 
The second story is called the abdomen and its 
only bony structure is the spine. The lowest 
story of all is called the pelvis and has a large 
bony frame, solid and strong, for it not only has 
to support the stories above, but to it are at¬ 
tached the jointed stilts, or legs, which carry the 
house about. 

Our residences are often adorned with columns ; 
our bodily dwelling has but one, called the spinal 
column, but that is of great importance. It 
unites the upper and lower stories and forms part 
of the frame-work of the second and third stories. 
The spinal column is long and flexible and com¬ 
posed of twenty-six bones ; in shape they are 



THE FRAME-WORK. 


19 


like short spools with handles on one side, and 
are set one on the other, the handles all pointing 
the same way. I said one on the other, but, in 
reality, there are cushions of cartilage between 
each two bones, and this is what makes it pos¬ 
sible to bend the column, for the cushions will 
yield on pressure. You see that everything about 
our house must be arranged to allow motion. 
The spine is not straight, but curves gently, 
something like an elongated letter S, and this 
makes a sort of spring which yields to the shock 
of jumping and walking, and prevents the furni¬ 
ture and machinery in the different rooms from 
being jarred out of place or otherwise injured. 

In the mechanical appendages, which we call 
arms and legs, different sorts of movable joints 
are employed. The ball-and-socket joint is one 
in which the rounded end of one bone fits 
into a cup-like hollow in another bone. The 
hinge-joint allows of motion only in one direc¬ 
tion, like the hinge-joint of a door. A boy could 
not play base ball very well if he had a ball-and- 
socket joint at elbows and knees, and a hinge- 
joint at hips and shoulders, so he will appreciate 
the fact that this condition is reversed, and that 
the joints which allow freedom of motion are 
placed at hip and shoulders, and the hinge-joints 
at elbows and knees. The upper story, or head, 



20 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


is united to the spinal column by a pivot joint; 
that is, a projection of one bone is surrounded 
by a ring of another bone, and that allows a 
turning and twisting motion. 

I have not time to tell you about all of the 
admirable contrivances of the frame-work of the 
House Wonderful, but I advise you to study 
it. Instead of thinking of the bony skeleton as 
a frightful thing, consider it a marvelous piece 
of machinery, wonderfully adapted to a designed 
purpose, and affording lessons in mechanism to 
the wisest builders and engineers. 

Now perhaps you will say, “You told us that 
the frame-work of the body is made of bone, 
but what is bone made of ? ” The chemist 
tells us that bones are made of animal and 
earthy matter, and that we can prove this for our¬ 
selves if we wish. We can destroy the animal 
matter by burning the bone, and the earthy 
matter thus left will still keep the shape of the 
bone, but it will crumble to pieces at the slight¬ 
est touch. If we put two ounces of muriatic 
acid in one pint of water, and soak a bone in it 
for two or three days, the earthy matter will be 
dissolved, while the shape of the bone will be 
unchanged. It will be so flexible that we can 
tie it in a knot without breaking it. This might 
make it very pretty to look at, but such bones 



THE FRAME-WORK. 


21 


would not make a very solid frame-work for our 
bodily house, and so it is quite important that 
we should learn how bones grow and whether 
there is anything we can do to make them strong. 
The bones of little children are mostly of animal 
matter so that they bend easily and are not 
so easily broken. The bones of older people 
break more readily because they have so much 
larger proportion of earthy matter. When we 
come to talk of the guests which man entertains 
in his bodily dwelling, we shall have something 
to say of how bones may be made strong and 
kept in good health. 

The foundations of buildings are made of 
stone and cemented with mortar, and mortar is 
made of lime. Bones are made strong by lime 
in various forms, so they are not unlike founda¬ 
tions after all. If we could look into the bones 
of a living child, we should see them changing 
from the soft, flexible bones of the baby to the 
strong, hard bones of the man by the accumula¬ 
tion, at various points, of little bits of lime, or 
calcareous matter. They are beginning to os¬ 
sify, or bonify , if we may make a word. These 
limy spots grow bigger and bigger until they 
unite in one hard bone. But, although the 
bones are hard, they are not solid. Even flat 
bones are made with little holes all through 



22 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


them, which give them a sort of spongy appear¬ 
ance, and the shafts of the long bones are hol¬ 
low. 

The ends of the long bones are large and 
rounded to form the joints, and are tipped with 
cushions of cartilage, or gristle. They are held 
together by bands called ligaments, and are 
enclosed in a sac having the power to make a 
fluid which, in a way, oils the joints. At rail¬ 
way stations you have often seen a man oiling 
the wheels of a train; or perhaps the train 
stopped between stations, and when people 
asked, ‘ ‘ What is the matter ? ” the answer was, 
“Hot-box.” Looking out of the window, you 
have seen men pouring water on a smoking 
wheel, and were told that the friction had been 
so great that smoke, or even fire, had resulted. 
And that was perhaps because some one had for¬ 
gotten to oil that wheel. But the machinery of 
our bodily house oils itself, and that saves us a 
great deal of anxiety for fear that we may forget 
some important part. 

The frame-work is held together by the white, 
shining ligaments, which are tough and strong, 
but flexible. So now we have the frame-work 
jointed and tied together, but it hangs still and 
motionless. 



CHAPTER III. 


THE WALLS AND MACHINERY. 

T HE walls of the buildings at the great Colum¬ 
bian Exposition were covered with a material 
called staff, a composition of plaster of Paris 
which can be formed into many beautiful shapes, 
in time becoming hard and unchangeable. The 
walls enclosing the various apartments of our 
bodily dwelling are made of a substance called 
muscle, a material which permits the house to as¬ 
sume many shapes and change them often, and 
instead of being injured by the constant variety of 
attitudes, the walls grow stronger the more they 
are used. Muscles not only form the walls, but 
they are also the machinery for moving the bony 
frame-work, so muscles cover the arms and legs 
as well as the trunk of the body. 

I once went into a Swedish movement room 
where, making a great din, were many machines, 
the purpose of which was to exercise the various 
parts of the body, and people were going from 
one to another to be exercised. Here was a 
machine that shook the feet sidewise ; another 

[23] 


24 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


that vibrated them up and down ; here, a ma¬ 
chine that twisted the body ; and here, one that 
lifted and dropped the shoulders ; and all the 
machines were running at the same rate of speed, 
and repeating the motions every so often without 
variation. 

“This is very clever,” I thought, and then I 
remembered our bodily dwelling, and said, “ How 
much more is its mechanism to be admired ! 
There is no noise, the movements vary in speed 
at any instant, as Man wills, and all are com¬ 
bined in one compact machine always at hand 
and ready for use, so that he does not have to 
go to one place to shake his hands and tp another 
to shake his feet, and to still another to twist his 
body. ” 

But what moves this muscular machinery ? 
In the Swedish movement room we could see 
the whirling wheels and bands and we knew that 
in another room was an engine that transmitted 
power through shafts to them. But we cannot 
see such an arrangement in our muscles. This 
brings me to tell you of the wonderful properties 
of muscles. The first I shall name is contrac¬ 
tility. When you want some one to know what 
strong muscles you have, you ask him to feel of 
your arm, and then you clinch your fist, and 
bend your elbow and say, ‘ ‘ Can you feel it 



THE WALLS AND MACHINERY. 


25 


swell ? ” It was the swelling of the muscle that 
made the elbow bend. The muscle contracted 
and grew shorter and at the same time larger 
around. This is what is meant by contractility, 
and it is by this property of muscle that all move¬ 
ments are made. We have little idea of the 
force with which muscles contract, they move so 
easily, but we are told that with a ten-pound 
weight in the hand the muscles that bend the 
elbow contract with a force of two hundred 
pounds. It is also said that a muscle contracts 
better when it has a weight to lift than when it 
has none ; so it would seem that muscles are quite 
like folks, for I have often noticed that when 
people have nothing to do, it is very hard to get 
them to work ; but when they have a great 
deal to do, they do n’t mind adding to their 
labors. 

The second property of muscles is irritability. 
That does not mean that they get cross if 
called on to work, but it means that they respond 
to stimuli. A boy that is hopping about in a 
lively manner while being punished, is respond¬ 
ing to the stimulus of the whip. When he goes 
quietly to obey his father’s orders, he is respond¬ 
ing to the stimulus of a command. The usual 
stimulus of the muscles is will-power sent over 
the nerves. But muscles also respond to the 



26 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


stimulus of heat, or to pricking, or pinching, or to 
electricity. 

Muscles have also the property of elasticity, 
that is, of going back to their original length 
after being stretched, as a piece of rubber does ; 
and that is an important quality, you see, or 
it might be a serious matter to stretch our 
muscles, and we would be hindered in doing 
many things we want to do for fear we could not 
get our muscles back again as they were. But 
our muscles are always slightly on the stretch. 
If it were not so we should be obliged to “ take in 
slack,” as it were, whenever we want to make a 
motion before the movement could begin ; but 
because they are always slightly stretched, they 
can begin to contract as soon as the stimulus is 
felt. 

If muscles were used only as the walls of our 
house, they might be laid over the frame-work in 
flat masses, but as they are the motor power to 
lift and move the bony levers, they must be 
constructed and attached with that object in 
view. 

A muscle is made up of a bundle of fleshy 
strings called fibers, and each fiber is made up of 
very fine, small threads called fibrils. Each fiber 
is wrapped in a thin membrane, and a bundle of 
fibers wrapped in another membrane makes a mus- 



THE WALLS AND MA CHINER Y. 


27 


cle. Fibrils are finer than cobweb, so fine, indeed, 
that it would need many thousands of them to 
make a bundle an inch thick. You will better 
understand how muscles are made, perhaps, if 
you examine some spool of cotton. You may 
think it is all of one piece, but by twisting it 
toward you, you will discover three strands; 
each of these can be separated into still finer 
strands, and each of these into finer ones still. 
These last represent the fibrils. There is one dif¬ 
ference, however, between fibers of thread and 
those of muscle. In thread the fibers are twisted 
together ; in muscles, they lie side by side and are 
held together by a fine network of connective 
tissue; fat is packed around to fill all the spaces 
and form cushions to round out the body and 
make it look plump. Each muscle has a thick 
middle part and tapers at the ends into a strong 
white cord or band, called a tendon, and these 
tendons are fastened to the bones. There are 
more than twice as many muscles as bones, that 
is, nearly five hundred. You see, they work in 
pairs that oppose each other. It is not always 
< < a long pull and a strong pull and a pull all to¬ 
gether ” with the muscles, but it is more like a 
* ‘ you pull against me and I ’ll pull against you, 
and between us we’ll keep things straight.” So 
when the work of one muscle is to bend any 



28 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


part of the body, there will always be found an 
opposing muscle to straighten it. Those which 
bend are flexors. Those which straighten are 
extensors. 

Think what a complicated machine this body 
is ! Why, it takes six little muscles to turn the 
eyeballs in various directions, and there are 
about fifty in the arm and hand. 

Muscles are of different shapes. Some round, 
some flat, some long, others short, some very 
large, and some very small, and all have names. 
Sometimes the names are bigger and longer than 
the muscles themselves. For instance, the one 
that lifts the corners of the mouth and expands 
the nostrils is called the Levator labii superioris 
alczque nasi. Just think what a trouble it 
would be to call it by name every time you want 
it to work. Or imagine that you could never 
frown unless you called on the orbicularis pal¬ 
pebrarum to pucker your forehead for you. It is 
a good thing for us that we can learn to manage 
our bodily machinery without knowing anything 
about the Latin names of the various parts, and 
the boy enjoys climbing trees even if he knows 
nothing about the Latissimus dorsi that pulls his 
arms back and enables him to climb. 

Walking through the streets of a Southern 
city, my attention was attracted by a row of 



THE WALLS AND MACHLNERY. 


29 


dilapidated tenement houses. The roof of one 
house sank in the middle until it made me think 
of a “sway-back” horse. One house had 
leaned over to one side until it seemed that it 
must certainly fall, and two had settled back¬ 
ward so that they looked as if they were tired, 
and were just going to sit down. They were pic¬ 
turesque, but no one would earnestly desire to live 
in them, and to my eye a body that caves in at 
the thorax, and curves out at the shoulders, and 
whose neck is a veritable leaning tower with the 
cupola balanced at a precarious angle, is not 
to be admired, but most certainly to be 
avoided. 

The erect attitude of the body maintains a 
vertical line from the center of the head down 
through the shoulders and hips to the ground. 
If the line between hips and shoulders is in any 
degree oblique, the body is not balanced on the 
balls of the feet as it ought to be, but rests too 
much on the heels. If we closely observe people 
in our streets, we shall see that the majority 
carry the shoulders back of the hips. This 
throws the body out of balance, and, as a con¬ 
sequence, the head is projected forward, the 
back is rounded, the chest is compressed, the 
abdomen made prominent, and the beautiful 
curves of the spine entirely changed. This at- 



30 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


titude is not only unhealthful but ungraceful, and 
effectually prevents a dignified carriage and gait. 

The habit of stooping is often acquired in 
schools, and parents, seeing the shoulders be¬ 
coming rounded, keep up a continual cry of, 

‘ ‘ Draw your shoulders back ; ” and in the at¬ 
tempt to obey this order, the vertical line before 
mentioned becomes an oblique line, and the un- 
gainliness of attitude is emphasized rather than 
overcome. 

To prevent or to cure round shoulders we have 
only to remember that the cause is not in the 
shoulders but in the disuse of those muscles 
which should hold up the front of the body. 
The military attitude accomplishes the desired 
result. The orders are to elevate the chest, 
draw in the chin, draw back the abdomen, and 
let the arms hang naturally. To follow this 
rule is at once to overcome the round shoulders. 

If, instead of continually blaming the shoulders 
and trying to correct them, we should give our 
thought and attention to the strengthening of the 
muscles of the trunk of the body, especially the 
front waist-muscles, we should have adopted 
the most effectual means of procuring an erect 
and graceful attitude. Holding the chest well 
up is very important, and by a very simple 
method we can be sure that we accomplish this. 




THE WALLS AND MACHINERY. 


31 


Stand with the face to a blank wall, the toes 
touching, now bring the chest up to the wall, 
keeping the abdomen back so that there will be 
a space between it and the wall. This is about 
the correct position. At first we may feel as if 
we were falling forward, but a glance into a 
mirror, as we stand sidewise before it, will show 
us that our attitude is merely an erect one, and 
this glance also will prove to us that this position 
adds greatly to the beauty and dignity of the 
person ; more than that, it adds to the health, 
because the body being perfectly balanced, all its 
internal organs are rightly related to each other ; 
they have room to work harmoniously, and the 
result will be manifest, not only in increased 
beauty of outline, but in a better digestion, a 
brighter eye, a more glowing cheek, and a clearer 
mind. 



32 


OUR BODILY DWELLING . 


DESCRIPTION OF ACCOMPANYING CUTS . 1 

Fig. i. This is a good standing position, but if main¬ 
tained any length of time is wearisome, as it keeps 
both legs in a state of muscular activity, whereas 
they should work alternately. 

Fig. 2. Position in walking. Also good rest position as 
it can be maintained some time without fatigue. 

Fig. 3. Gives a broad base and is therefore often as¬ 
sumed. Is not desirable, as it produces slight 
curvature of the spine, and makes the body un- 
symmetrical. 

Fig. 4. Good sitting position. Should become habitual. 

Fig. 5. A very bad attitude as it twists the spine. 

Fig. 6. An improper position pushing the shoulders up. 

Fig. 7. An improper attitude, as it makes the left side 
shorter than the right. 

Fig. 8. Very bad position, cramping the chest, crowding 
the contents of the abdomen downward. 

Fig. 9. Very bad attitude, strains the spine, and tends 
to produce permanent curvature. 


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CHAPTER IV. 


THE PLUMBING. 



VERY important part of every house is the 


1 ~\ plumbing. In the walls, between the floors, 
and everywhere out of sight are water pipes,, gas 
pipes, drainage pipes, electric wires, and speak¬ 
ing tubes. The health and comfort of the house¬ 
hold depend upon the perfection of the plumber’s 
work. Knowing that the divine Architect is all¬ 
wise, we would naturally expect the plumbing of 
our bodily dwelling to be perfect, and we are not 
disappointed. That is, it is created perfect, but 
we often let it get out of repair, and then we 
suffer. Perhaps we blame the Architect for this 
when we ourselves are at fault. 

Minute tubes, some conveying fluid and nour¬ 
ishment and others carrying away waste mate¬ 
rial, pass through the muscular walls and even 
through the solid substance of the bones. The 
muscles are covered by a sheathing called the 
skin which is full of the tubes, so full that you 
cannot put down the point of a pin anywhere 
upon it without drawing blood. In the skin is 


3 


[ 33 ] 


34 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


also a system of drainage pipes called sweat glands. 
They are very fine tubes, so short that ten of 
them, end to end, would only make an inch in 
length, and yet there are so many of them, all 
coiled up into knots, that if they were straight¬ 
ened out and laid end to end they would reach 
over four miles. There is something for you to 
think about. 

In this chapter we learn only of the drainage 
pipes which are located in the skin, while the 
tubes that carry fluids to all parts of the body 
and those which act as drainage pipes to carry 
off waste matter from the interior, will be de¬ 
scribed in the various rooms to which they 
belong. 

If a drop of water falls on a hot stove, it dries 
so quickly that we see no steam, but if we pour 
on a large quantity at once, we see the vapor, 
and know that the water is evaporated. When 
you run and get very warm, the sweat glands 
pour out water on the skin in large drops, but 
these glands are not idle even while we do 
not see the water on the surface of the body. 
They are at work all the time, but the water 
usually evaporates as soon as it reaches the 
surface. This we call insensible perspiraticfn. 
It is all the time passing from the skin, and we 
are told that it amounts to nearly two pounds in 



THE PLUMBING. 


35 


twenty-four hours. When we exercise, it is 
greatly increased and may amount to one pound 
in one hour. This waste of water from the sur¬ 
face of the body must be replaced by the water 
we drink, and that explains why we are so thirsty 
in hot weather or when we exercise. Heat causes 
these glands to throw out water rapidly, and the 
evaporation of the water carries off the heat of 
the body and keeps the temperature down to the 
normal point. If for any reason we cannot per¬ 
spire in hot weather, or by means of exercise, we 
suffer greatly. 

The perspiration is something besides water; 
it contains solid waste material, which, as the 
water evaporates, is left on the skin and stops 
up the little drainage tubes, unless we keep them 
open by frequent bathing. The little oil glands 
in the skin pour out a fatty secretion that dries 
on the surface, and the skin itself sheds little 
pieces of worn-out substance, which are caught 
in the perspiration as it dries, and cling to the 
surface. If we want the drainage of our bodily 
house to be faultless, we must keep these 
tubes open by the frequent use of soap and 
water. 

A few practical suggestions as to taking care 
of the skin so that its waste-pipes may be kept 
in working order will not be amiss. 



36 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


RULES FOR BATHING. 

1. Never bathe sooner than two hours after a 
meal. To draw the blood to the surface of the 
body soon after eating interferes with digestion. 
Going in swimming soon after eating is especially 
dangerous, and a post-mortem examination of 
those who have lost their lives in this way re¬ 
veals the fact that the pressure of the water 
forces the contents of the full stomach up into 
the esophagus and throat, and from there they 
are drawn into the trachea, causing suffocation. 
One should not eat under an hour after 
bathing. 

2. Feeble persons should rest after bathing 
until the equilibrium of the circulation is restored. 
Those who are vigorous may exercise after a 
bath. 

3. Never bathe when completely exhausted. 
A bath, to be beneficial, must be followed by 
complete reaction, and this is not possible when 
a person is fatigued. 

4. The temperature of the bath-room is of 
importance, for, if too cold, it will require too 
much vitality to react. If the bath leaves the 
skin blue and cold, and the person shivers and 
cannot get warm for some hours, it has been an 
injury. 



THE PLUMBING. 


37 


5. The hot bath should be followed by a 
quick application of cold water, so as to leave 
the skin in a tonic condition, thus lessening the 
danger of taking cold. 

The time of day best suited for a bath must 
be decided by each individual’s peculiarities, or 
by the circumstances of his life. Perhaps, theo¬ 
retically, ten or eleven o’clock in the morning 
is the best time, but, practically, this is, for most 
people, a very inconvenient hour. Delicate peo¬ 
ple, perhaps, would do best to bathe just before 
going to bed. Vigorous people might bathe the 
first thing in the morning. Rubbing with olive 
oil, or cocoa butter after the bath keeps the 
skin smooth and supple, and acts also as a sort 
of covering to prevent taking cold. 

Dry rubbing of the skin may also be employed 
in place of the bath. It will remove the dead 
scales of the scarf skin and keep the pores open. 
Owners of fine horses know how beneficial it is 
to have them well-groomed, but they often act 
as if they did not know that a well-groomed man 
is as much to be desired, not only out of consid¬ 
eration for the olfactory sense of others, but also 
for health, comfort, beauty, and the maintenance 
of self-respect. 



CHAPTER V. 


THE SHEATHING. 


CROSS the street I see men covering the out- 



side of a new house. They first put on a 
layer of rough boards ; over these, a layer of felt 
paper ; then narrow boards, the lower edges of 
which overlap the boards beneath. This makes a 
tight, warm, water-proof protection to the rooms 
inside. Our bodily house must also have a pro¬ 
tecting covering; but if it were nailed on, all 
the elaborate machinery made to move it about 
would be of no use. Just fancy how it would 
be if we were afraid of breaking to pieces if 
we ran about, or of pulling out the nails that 
fastened our siding on if we wanted to jump 
or climb. Our divine Architect makes no such 
mistakes. 

The sheathing of our wonderful house is the 
skin, and the outer layer is formed of over-lap¬ 
ping pieces more like scales or shingles than 
siding. This is called the epidermis, or scarf 
skin. Beneath this is the dermis, or true skin, 
which is made of both muscular and elastic fibers, 


[ 38 ] 


ME SHEATHING. 


39 


filled in with fat. The dermis is the part through 
which run the plumbing tubes spoken of in the 
last chapter, and in it also are the ends of the 
electric wires that carry messages from the owner 
to all parts of the house. 

In the building which the carpenters are cover¬ 
ing with boards, the rough ones are put under¬ 
neath and the smooth ones outside, and then a 
coat of paint is put on to give it a beautiful color. 
One peculiarity of the work of the divine Architect 
is that his work grows more and more beautiful 
the more closely and deeply we examine it. The 
outer covering is the coarse one, made as it is of 
horny scales that grow harder and harder as they 
are used, until, in places like the palm of the la¬ 
borer’s hand, they form what we call a callous. 
Under this course outside covering is the beautiful 
true skin, blushing with the bright color of the 
blood with which it is so richly supplied. The 
divine Architect does not paint the house on the 
outside, but in the lower layer of the upper skin 
is deposited a pigment which gives the house its 
hue. Some houses are a beautiful pink and 
white; in them there is little of the pigment or 
coloring matter. Others are yellow, others deep 
brown, and some are quite black ; but, if the 
outer skin be removed, the true skin in each 
will be just alike. 



40 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


The office of the skin is to protect the body, to 
keep it warm, to carry the plumbing tubes of the 
blood vessels, sweat glands, and electric wires of 
the nerves, and also the oil glands that keep it 
soft and smooth. 



Hair in its Follicle. 



CHAPTER VI. 


THE THATCH. 

I N the old world, houses are often thatched 
with straw instead of being roofed with shin¬ 
gles, slate, or tin, and we may say that our 
house has a thatch, not of straw, but of hair. 
Little new houses have not much thatch, and in 
old houses the thatch is sometimes worn off, and 
then we say they are bald. Hairs grow from 
little pockets in the skin ; and, in fact, they are 
a continuation of the cells of the skin itself, car¬ 
rying with them the same pigment that gives the 
skin its color. So we find that dark people have 
dark hair, and fair people have yellow or red 
hair. When no coloring matter is furnished, the 
hair becomes gray or even white. Into each hair 
pocket or follicle a little oil gland opens, so, you 
see, each separate hair has its own bottle of hair 
oil. If we keep the head clean and brush the 
hair well, we shall have no need of putting oil 
on it to make it smooth. 

Each hair follicle has a nerve, and that is why 
it hurts when the hair is pulled. Cold air, or 

[41] 


42 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


water, or a sudden fright will make these nerves 
contract, and that makes the hair stand on end, 
as we say. That is illustrated when a cat sees 
a dog and bristles up all over. One of Job’s 
friends says that he was frightened and his hair 
stood up. Read Job, 4th chapter, 15th verse. 

Hair is very elastic, and will stretch a good 
deal before breaking. It is also very strong. A 
single hair has held a weight of two and a half 
ounces. Hair is found all over the body except 
on the palms of the hands and the soles of the 
feet. 

The cells of the skin become hardened and 
form the nails, which protect the fingers and 
toes. If it were not for the finger-nails, we 
would find it difficult to untie knots, open pocket 
knives, and do many things we now do with 
ease. When we care for them, they also add to 
the beauty of the hand ; but if not trimmed 
neatly and kept clean, they are indicative of a 
lack of true politeness. 

A young girl was once putting on airs and at¬ 
tempting to pass herself off for a person of great 
importance, but another girl, who had been well 
brought up and trained to exquisite care of her¬ 
self, recognized the lack of this, and exclaimed, 
“She’s not a lady, look at her finger-nails!” 



CHAPTER VII. 


THE UPPER STORY, OR CUPOLA. 

N a short tower, called the neck, is found the 



most wonderful part of the house, the cu¬ 
pola, or head. It has a solid, dome-like, bony 
frame-work, covered with muscular walls, pro¬ 
tected by the skin, and roofed with the hairy 
thatch. In its fa$ade we have two windows — 
only two for the whole house, and yet they com¬ 
mand a view in all directions because the cupola 
is so balanced that it can turn from side to side, 
or up, or down, and if we have need to look be¬ 
hind us, we have only to turn the whole house 
around. I once read of a man who built his 
house on the abandoned turn-table of a railroad, 
and when he wanted the sun to shine on any 
apartment, he had only to turn the house 
around. He thought that was a very fine con¬ 
trivance, but, you see, that is what we all can 
do with our wonderful house, and we do it so 
often that we think nothing of it. 

Over the windows is a little thatch of hair to 
keep the rain of perspiration from running down 


[43] 


44 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


into the eyes. Between the windows is a portico 
with two circular doorways, through which the 
good fairy Aura goes in and out. Below these is 
a pair of pink folding doors about which I shall 
have more to tell you. On the sides of the cupola 
are porticoes for the admission of sound. How 
seldom we think of the fact that Man knows 
nothing of the world except through the medium 
of his bodily house. If his windows are broken, 
he sees no more ; if his porticoes of sound are 
stopped up, he can hear nothing ; and yet, know¬ 
ing this, he sometimes takes very little pains to 
keep his house in order. He will read by twi¬ 
light, or on the cars, or strain his eyes needlessly 
just as if he was certain that he could go out and 
buy a new pair when these were gone. What we 
want to do is to learn about our bodily dwelling, 
so that we may know how to keep it in repair ; 
so we will go on to study our upper story, the 
general office of the establishment. 

The contents of this upper story are so impor¬ 
tant and valuable that they must be well pro¬ 
tected, and so the frame-work is very strong 
and solid, made of twenty-two bones, dovetailed 
together in a spherical form, as that is the 
strongest possible shape. Eight of these bones, 
made of three layers, form what is called the 
cranium, or brain case. The outside layer, is 



THE UPPER STORY , OR CUPOLA. 


45 


thick, tough, and somewhat elastic, so that quite 
hard blows do not break it. The inner layer is 
thin, hard, and brittle, so it is called the vitreous, 
or glassy table of the skull. This might break 
easily, but between it and the outer layer is a 
spongy tissue of bone which deadens blows. See 
how wonderfully all this is arranged to protect 
the brain. First, the arched or spherical shape 
made of several pieces, and then the three layers 
of bone with their elastic and spongy construc¬ 
tion, and these mounted on the springy, flexible 
spinal column, all tending, as you see, to save 
the brain from jars, and make it safe for us to 
jump and climb and even receive falls and blows 
without serious injury. 

We adorn the inner walls of our residences 
with beautiful paper, or paint them various tints. 
The inner wall of the cupola is covered with 
three membranes ; the one lying close to the in¬ 
side of the skull is dense and fibrous, and is called 
the dura mater , the hard or durable mother. 
Inside of this is a very fine membrane called the 
arachnoid. There is a fable which tells of the 
Princess Arachne who was famed for spinning 
and was changed by Minerva into a spider. 
This membrane is called the arachnoid because 
it is so fine, like the cobweb for delicacy. The 
inner membrane is also fine and delicate and full 



46 


OUR BODILY DWELLING . 


of blood vessels. It is called the pia mater , or 
soft mother. And what shall we find in this 
room so carefully prepared ? Something wonder¬ 
ful and very precious, no doubt. 



Surface of the Cerebrum. 



CHAPTER VIII. 


THE GENERAL OFFICE. 

I ^HE apartment whose walls were described in 
. the last chapter is called the cavity of the 
skull, and is occupied by a wonderful workshop 
known as the brain. A little boy was once asked 
if he could give the contents of the different 
cavities of the body. He said, ‘ 4 The cavity of 
the skull contains the brains, when there are 
any.” We will take it for granted that all who 
are interested in the study of their bodily dwell¬ 
ing have skulls well stocked with brains, and will 
be interested in a description of this wonderful 
organ. Michelet, a French writer, calls it the 
“flower of flowers.” That is very pretty, but, 
after all, does not give us much idea how it 
looks. If you could see the brain of a calf, or of 
some other animal, it would give you a very 
good idea of the brain of man. The meat of an 
English walnut, in its folds and wrinkles, is 
something like the brain. A large piece of 
paper can be crumpled into a small space ; and 
if the wrinkles of the brain-substance were spread 

[47] 


48 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


out like a plain piece of paper, we should see 
that these folds have really given it a very 
large surface. 

The brain is composed of two kinds of matter ; 
one white, which forms the greater part of the 
interior, and the other gray, which spreads over 
the surface and dips down into all the folds or 
convolutions, as they are called. The depth of 
the convolutions seems to measure the intelli¬ 
gence of the individual. In a baby’s brain the 
convolutions are very shallow, but as he becomes 
more and more intelligent, they grow deeper, so 
you see that skulls of the same size may both be 
full of brains, and yet one contain a great deal 
more brain than the other, because it is more 
deeply wrinkled, or convoluted. You must not 
be discouraged by the big words we have to use 
in the study of the brain, or get tired and say 
you do n’t care to learn about it, because it is so 
uninteresting. Many things which, in the be¬ 
ginning, seem very dry, become very interesting 
to us after we have learned about them ; and per¬ 
haps in the study of the brain we shall put an 
added wrinkle into our own brain-substance and 
be so much the brighter. 

The brain is divided into the cerebrum, or great 
brain, and the cerebellum, or little brain, and 
each has its special work to do. It is always 



THE GENERAL OFFICE. 


49 


this way in a well-ordered workshop. You will 
not find the workman doing one kind of work to¬ 
day in one part of the shop, and the same work 
to-morrow in another part. He has his bench 
and tools in one place, and does his work always 
there because it is much more convenient, and we 
shall find very much to interest us in the differ¬ 
ent kinds of work that are done in the different 
parts of the brain. The great brain occupies the 
upper and front part of the cavity of the skull, 
and the small brain, the lower and back part. 
The two brains are connected by a bridge called 
the pons Varolii because a man named Varolius 
first described it. Did you ever imagine that 
you had a bridge in your head ? And what do 
you suppose passes back and forth upon it ? 

Brain looks not unlike a mass of dough in 
color, but is more like jelly in consistency. It is 
made of millions of little cells about which we 
shall learn when we study the servants of our 
wonderful house. 


4 



CHAPTER IX. 


THE RECEPTION ROOM AND HALL. 

B ETWEEN the windows of our house is a 
porch with a sloping roof that covers two 
circular doorways. Below this is a pair of pink 
folding doors that open into the reception room. 
These doors are beautiful and have marvelous 
capabilities. They are closed by a muscle called 
a sphincter, which acts much like the puckering 
strings of our shopping bags. When drawn up 
tight, the doors are pulled into folds, and in this 
shape can make very pretty music called whist¬ 
ling. When stretched, they produce what is 
known as a smile ; or, if the stretching is extreme, 
and we hear a loud “Ha! ha!” issuing from 
the doorway, we say that the man is laughing. 
That is the way Man has of letting it be known 
that he is greatly pleased. These doors also 
help him to make known his wishes, thoughts, 
and feelings, by means of spoken words, and 
these may be very pleasant or quite the contrary. 
We might almost call these doors curtains, for 
they are of soft muscle and have a bright pink 
[5o] 


THE RECEPTION ROOM AND HALL. 


51 


lining of mucous membrane. In some individu¬ 
als, an ornamental lambrequin of hair is fastened 
above these doors. It is not only an ornament 
but acts as a guard to the circular doorways 
above. 

We may as well learn right here that all the 
apartments of our bodily dwelling communicat¬ 
ing with the outer world are lined with mucous 
membrane, which in its structure is quite like 
the skin, and unites with it at the opening into 
these rooms. At the edges of the lips we can 
see where this union takes place. The purpose 
of this membrane is to secrete a fluid which 
moistens the surface. 

When the hands bring to the mouth any 
guests who desire to enter the house, the lips 
open to take them in, and, passing their folds, 
the guests are received by thirty-two attendants 
in a white uniform whose business it is to remove 
the wraps of visitors and make them fine enough 
to go on and visit the cook ; for all who enter 
here are on their way to the kitchen. I said 
there were thirty-two attendants in white. There 
are not always thirty-two, and they are not al¬ 
ways in white. Sometimes their uniforms have 
been sadly soiled and torn, and have been patched 
and the patching trimmed with gold — which 
does not add to its beauty, however. 



52 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


In little new houses these attendants are alto¬ 
gether absent, but they are only asleep in their 
little pink cradles in the frame of the doorways 
called the jaws. There are only twenty of these, 
however, and for some months they lie still and 
sleep. Then they begin to be anxious to see the 
world and push their heads up so hard that they 
often make the baby cry. But they do n’t seem 
to care for that, for they push away until one by 
one their little white crowns appear. Did I not 
tell you that they were royal attendants ? O 
yes, they are, for each one wears a crown. For 
six or seven years these little servants stay, and 
then are crowded out by others who have lain in 
their cradles all this while, only waiting for the 
time to come for them to crowd their older 
brothers entirely out of the way and take their 
places, and now there are thirty-two of them, 
sixteen in each jaw. 

In the center of each jaw are four sharp fel¬ 
lows called incisors, who investigate every vis¬ 
itor in a biting way, and pass him on to the rest, 
and they press him on all sides until, when they 
are through with him, he feels pretty well 
crushed. These latter attendants are called 
molars, or grinders, and you know them all as 
the teeth. Sometimes visitors on their way to 
the kitchen are so soft that they slip through 



THE RECEPTION ROOM AND HALL. 


53 


without much attention from the molars, but 
they are really not as well received by the cook 
as if they had been willing to be more thoroughly 
investigated. Then, too, it is no kindness to be 
sparing of the work of the molars, for they keep 
stronger and last longer if they have plenty of 
hard work to do. That is one peculiarity of our 
house. All of its workers keep in better health if 
they have plenty of the right kind of work to do. 

I might suggest to you that these thirty-two 
servants, the teeth, need frequent bathing and 
scrubbing with a soft brush if you want them to 
keep in good health. When they are through 
with their work, they should have all dirt care¬ 
fully removed, not only from the surface but 
from between them. They are such sturdy sol¬ 
diers that they never break ranks, so you will 
have to clean them as they stand, solidly and 
closely together, and I would warn you to 
use them well and not to crack nuts, or to pull 
needles or nails with them (I have known people 
to do that), for this may injure their constitu¬ 
tions so that they break down all together, and 
then you will be in a sad plight, indeed. 

These attendants do not do their full work 
until visitors have been judged by a guard in a 
pink uniform, who occupies a constant position 
in the reception room for the purpose of passing 



54 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


his opinion on guests. This guard is chained to 
the floor so that he never can go away from 
home, but he sometimes puts his head out of the 
open door, though this is considered rather a 
breach of good manners. His name is Gusta¬ 
tory Sense, or Taste, as he is sometimes called 
for short. If those who enter here are pleasing 
to him, he allows them to receive the attention 
of the teeth; if not, he rejects them at once. 
However, he is not to be fully relied upon, for 
he sometimes becomes very fond of those who 
are injurious to the best interests of the house, 
and allows their entrance when he ought to put 
them out immediately. In this case he consults 
his own whims and fancies rather than the wel¬ 
fare of the house and its master. 

Certain persons have the power of making 
every one feel at ease, and we find some such 
affable attendants in the reception room of our 
house. There are three closets called glands on 
each side of the reception room, making six in 
all, and from these issue Saliva, whose especial 
business it is to help guests along. Some folks, 
you know, are so stiff in their manners that we 
say they are “starched up,” and Saliva pays 
especial attention to such, accompanying them 
all the way to the kitchen, and making them 
very sweet by changing their starch into sugar. 



THE RECEPTION ROOM AND HALL. 


55 


The roof of the reception room is arched or 
vaulted, and is called the hard palate. At the 
back of this room, which you know as the mouth, 
are two fleshy pillars, and between these is hung 
a pink portilre, or curtain, called the uvula, or 
soft palate. This curtain answers a double pur¬ 
pose ; it divides the reception room from the hall, 
and it is also drawn up and back to close the 
passage into the nose when solids or liquids are 
passing down the throat. 

We shall now talk of the throat as the hall of 
our wonderful house. It is a peculiar hall in 
that it has no floor. Seven passages lead out 
of it ; one into the mouth, two up into the nose, 
two into the ears, one to the lungs, and one to 
the stomach. We shall study each of these by 
and by. Now we will go with the guests across 
the hall or pharynx to the kitchen stairs, or 
esophagus, as it is called. These are peculiar 
stairs, about nine inches long, not quite straight, 
and with muscular walls which contract behind 
the descending substance and push it along. If 
it is a very small substance, these muscles have 
very hard work to squeeze it down, and that is 
why we may find it such hard work to swallow a 
small pill when we can easily swallow a mouth¬ 
ful of food. 



CHAPTER X. 


THE KITCHEN. 

A T the bottom of the stairs we find ourselves 
at the top of the kitchen, and must jump 
down the rest of the way. This kitchen is a 
wonderful room, and when full is about one 
foot long and four inches broad. If you have 
ever studied in the kindergarten, I suppose you 
would call it irregularly conical in shape. This 
room, which is named stomach, has a strong 
wall of three coats, the outer one of fibrous 
tissue, called the serous coat, the inner, a mu¬ 
cous membrane, and between these a muscular 
coat whose fibers run in three directions — one 
set lengthwise, one around, and one obliquely. 
When these three sets of muscles contract, you 
can see how they draw the stomach into a smal¬ 
ler compass, and so churn the contents about. 
Here in this active, moving kitchen we find the 
cook, Gastric Juice, at work, cutting up the 
meat, peeling the vegetables, and breaking them 
into small pieces. He pays no attention to 
starch, but the saliva that accompanied starch 
[ 56 ] 


THE KITCHEN. 


57 


into the stomach still acts upon it. Oil is 
churned by the motion of the stomach, and so 
all the contents are thoroughly mingled. 

In the walls of the kitchen are little depres¬ 
sions, which we may call cupboards, where Gas¬ 
tric Juice finds the substances he needs in his 
work. As the material for the nourishment and 
repair of the house is prepared in this room, it is 
quite important that we should understand its 
laws, for every part of our house is governed by 
laws which were laid down by the divine Archi¬ 
tect himself. One of these laws is that food to 
be digested must be at blood heat. It is there¬ 
fore injurious to drink large quantities of very 
cold water while we are eating ; for, as we may 
see, it puts out the kitchen fire, and so hinders 
the cook in his work. Ice water, too, by sud¬ 
denly checking perspiration and chilling the body 
when heated, has caused death. 

We can interfere with the work of the stom¬ 
ach by eating too much, for when the walls are 
greatly distended they cannot easily contract, 
and so stomach digestion is hindered. From 
three to five hours are needed to complete the 
work of the stomach, and to eat between meals 
gives the cook extra labor, and then, perhaps, 
he does nothing well. You can imagine how 
cross you would be if you had a cake half baked, 



58 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


and some one should open the oven door and 
stir into it a quantity of raw material, even if 
it were the same as that of which the cake was 
made, and more angry still if it were raw apples 
or nuts or candy; you ought, therefore, to be as 
thoughtful of your bodily cook as you would like 
others to be if you were cooking. 

The exit from the kitchen is through an open¬ 
ing called the pylorus, which only allows food 
to pass out when thoroughly digested and keeps 
back all that is still undigested, so that it will be 
churned and mixed with the active substances of 
the gastric juice. This gate sometimes refuses 
to let things pass at all, in which case they may 
be sent hurriedly back up the stairs, through the 
hall and reception room, and cast out of the 
front door. This we call vomiting. It occurs 
when poisonous or hurtful materials are swal¬ 
lowed, or when the work of the cook has been 
for some time greatly interfered with by over¬ 
eating, or by eating unwholesome food. 

Chemistry takes food to pieces and tells us 
that it is made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, 
and oxygen. Man’s body is made of the same 
elements, but we cannot live on them in that 
form ; we must have them made up into various 
combinations. Plants can take them in the raw 
state and make them over into themselves, then 



THE KITCHEN. 


59 


we get them from the plants ; or other animals 
eat the plants and then we eat the animals. 
Some substances contain all these elements and 
are called proteids or, sometimes, albuminoids, 
because they are like albumen, or white of egg. 
Another substance containing all the elements 
is called gluten, and is found in grains. Still 
another is legumin, found in peas and beans. 
Casein is found in milk, and myosin, in muscle. 

To obtain the right amount needed to keep 
the body in repair, we do not try to find some 
one substance containing all the elements, but 
we eat a variety of foods, such as bread, meat, 
eggs, milk, and fruits, so that the servants and 
general manager can select from the whole mass 
the things that are needed. We should not try 
to live wholly on starch and sweets which alone 
will not keep us alive. 

All the food§ we eat may be divided into 
albuminous, oleaginous or fatty, saccharine or 
that containing sugar, and amylaceous or starchy. 
We have seen that saliva digests starch, and that 
gastric juice acts on albuminoids and sugar; but 
as yet we have found nothing that acts on fats. 
These oily guests come into our house and slip 
down into the kitchen where no notice is taken 
of them except to make them step around rather 
lively, until they come to have a much smaller 



60 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


opinion of themselves than when they entered, 
and then they are allowed, with all the rest, to 
pass through the pylorus into the next apart¬ 
ment. 

Water is also a very important food, both be¬ 
cause- the body is about three fourths water, and 
because water is being cast off constantly through 
the drainage tubes and must be replaced. As 
fruits are largely composed of water, they are 
valuable both as food and drink. 



CHAPTER XI. 


THE STORE-ROOM. 

T HE next room is sometimes called the second 
kitchen, but it has also a Latin name, duo¬ 
denum , because it is as long as twelve fingers 
are broad. It is very narrow and curved like a 
horse-shoe, and its walls, like those of the stom¬ 
ach, are serous, muscular, and mucous. The 
food that has been broken up in the kitchen 
passes into the store-room ready to be further 
prepared for use, and here come two important 
assistants to help do the work. They are called 
Pancreatic Juice and Bile. Pancreatic Juice is 
said to be the most important helper in the prep¬ 
aration of foods for use in the house, though, 
like many other important people, he is seldom 
mentioned, and many have never heard of him. 
He is of a kindly nature and does not ask whether 
those who need his aid are rich or poor, but 
gives attention to all. He completes the work 
which Saliva began on the starch, and finishes 
on the albuminoids what Gastric Juice has left 
undone. He also acts on the oily substances,— 
splits them up, as it is said. Pancreatic Juice has 

[61 ] 


62 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


his home in a room called the pancreas. In ani¬ 
mals it is called the sweet bread. 

Bile comes from the liver, and after leaving 
his own especial room, the gall-bladder, he 
passes down a hall known as the common bile- 
duct into the store-room, where he joins in the 
work of preparing the food for use. It used to 
be thought that Bile was aristocratic, and that 
he only paid attention to those who had ‘ * struck 
oil,” in other words, the fats, but we find now 
that he condescends to do other work. Indeed, 
we are told that he does not attend to fats 
perfectly without the aid of Pancreatic Juice. 
One of the offices of Bile is to prevent things 
from getting into that disturbed state known as 
putrefactive fermentation ; that is, to keep them 
sweet and good. He also assists greatly in the 
taking up of the nutritious material by the little 
eaters of the dining room, known as absorbents, 
and he is also willing to help do the work of 
sweeping out the dining-room. So I think that 
we ought not to say that Bile is aristocratic, but 
should give him credit for all he does so willingly _ 

The walls of the store-room are fitted up with 
shelves made of folds of the mucous membrane, 
and this, you see, increases the surface. There 
are also many little cupboards, called glands, 
which secrete a fluid to be used in the work of 
digestion. 



CHAPTER XII. 


THE DINING-ROOM. 



PENING out of the store-room is the dining- 


room, a long, narrow apartment about an 
inch across but more than twenty feet in length. 
It has the same three coats as the kitchen and 
store-room. The first eight feet receives the 
name of the jejunum , a Latin word meaning 
empty, because it is usually found empty after 
death. The remainder is called the ilium , 
meaning twisted. 

This long, narrow dining-room occupies the 
greater part of the second story of the house — 
the abdominal cavity ; and, as this is compara¬ 
tively a small place, the intestines must be 
folded and coiled to fit into it. They are not 
just twisted up and laid loosely in the abdominal 
cavity, but are held in place by a membrane 
called the mesentery. This membrane is as 
long as the intestines, but only about four inches 
broad. The intestines lie along one edge like 
the trimming on a ruffle, and the other edge is 
gathered, like a ruffle, into a length of six inches, 


[63] 


64 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


and this is fastened to the spine, thus holding the 
bowels in place and yet leaving them free. The 
internal lining of the intestines is in folds, making 
the same shelves as are found in the store-room, 
and for the same purpose of increasing the sur¬ 
face. Here, also, are glands secreting the fluid 
needed to complete the work of digestion. The 
head waiter is named Intestinal Juice, and he 
gives a general supervision to the completion of 
all processes of digestion and the preparation of 
food for absorption. 

And who is to eat the dinner so elaborately 
prepared ? O, the dining-room is always full of 
hungry little mouths ready to take in the food. 
They are never away riding a “safety ” or play¬ 
ing lawn tennis; they never wait for the dinner 
bell to ring and then go scampering in with hair 
awry; they are always right there attending 
strictly to the business of eating. And such 
quiet, polite little eaters as they are. They 
never crowd each other nor scramble for the 
food, nor refuse to eat good bread and butter 
because they want cake. They are so small that 
as many as sixty of them are found in the one- 
hundredth part of a square inch. 

When we were on ship board, we found our 
chairs were fastened to the floor, but in the 
dining-room of our bodily dwelling the little 


























The Parotid — One of the Salivary Glands. 

Page 54. 



Corpuscles of Hu¬ 
man Blood, Highly 
Magnified. Page 77. 



THE DINING ROOM. 


65 


eaters themselves are fastened and cannot run 
away, so you may think that it is no particu¬ 
lar credit to them that they are always found 
at home. 

Under the microscope they look like little fine 
hairs, and give the walls a velvety appearance. 
They, too, have a Latin name ; one is called a 
villus , and all are called villi , just as we say 
“Mr. Jones” when we speak of one, and the 
“Joneses” when we mean the whole family. 
How do you suppose the Joneses would feel if, 
when they came to breakfast, they should find 
that the meat and potato, and bread and milk, 
and fruits and coffee had all been pounded and 
ground and mixed together in one thin gruel-like 
mass (I am afraid they would say mess), and 
they could not say whether they would take eggs 
or oatmeal, or buckwheat cakes, or biscuit, but 
were just obliged to take the gruel and be satis¬ 
fied. That is the way with the villi. They 
have no choice in the matter ; they are obliged 
to obey St. Paul and ‘ ‘ eat what is set before 
them, asking no questions.” 

Everything that has passed through the kitchen 
and store-room is mixed in a thin milky gruel, 
called chyle, and the villi work away sucking it 
in for dear life ; yes, for our dear life, for they are 
eating that we may live. They are simply tak- 
5 



66 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


ing up this chyle, to pass it on, that it may go to 
build us up. 

We know that the food we eat is made over 
into our bones and flesh and nerves ; but how 
does it get into the blood so that it can be carried 
to the various parts of the body ? The sugar 
that is digested in the stomach goes directly into 
the blood with the water, both being absorbed by 
the walls of the stomach. In the intestines, the 
villi suck up the milky chyle and gather it into a 
vessel called a lacteal, which is from the Latin 
word lac , meaning milk. These lacteals are held 
in the folds of the mesentery, and are connected 
by fine canals with other vessels called lymphatic 
glands, each of which is about as large as an 
almond. There is said to be about one hundred 
and fifty of them. They are spongy in structure, 
and when the lacteals pour their fluid contents 
into these lymphatic glands, you can understand 
how they take up the fluid as a sponge takes up 
water. After soaking through the glands and 
undergoing some changes, this fluid passes out 
through the canals into other lacteals, until it 
reaches a reservoir called the receptaculum chyli , 
or receptacle of chyle. One change that comes 
to the chyle while passing through the lymphatic 
glands is the power to coagulate, or form a clot. 
It also contains numerous white cells that it did 
not have before, 




THE DINING-ROOM. 


67 


The receptacle for the chyle is at the lower end 
of a canal called the thoracic duct, which leads 
up through the floor of the thorax, through the 
third story of the house to the large vein at 
the base of the round tower of the neck, called 
the jugular vein. You see, therefore, that this 
system of lacteals, glands, and ducts is a part of 
the plumbing of the house, but it could not be 
described until we came to talk of the different 
rooms and their contents. 

All through the various parts of the body, not 
only in the tissues of the vital organs, as the con¬ 
tents of the different cavities are called, but also 
in the appendages of the arms and legs, are ves¬ 
sels called lymphatics, and they are connected 
with the lymphatic glands, which are just like 
the lacteals and glands of the mesentery, and are 
therefore included in the plumbing. They carry 
a fluid called lymph. 

And how is lymph made, and what is its use ? 
This I will tell you in the chapter about the gen¬ 
eral manager. 

We must not close this chapter without speak¬ 
ing of the colon, or large intestine, which may 
be called the scavenger box of our bodily dwell¬ 
ing, receiving, as it does, the waste material from 
the dining-room, and good housekeepers will 
know that it should be emptied at least once 
a day. It begins low down in the right side of 



68 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


the abdominal cavity where the small intestine 
enters into it at right angles ; not quite at its 
lower end, for below the place of union there is 
a little pouch known as the coecum , one of a 
number of little closets of which much more is 
unknown than known. 

The colon goes up the right side of th6 abdo¬ 
men as far as the liver, there it turns and goes 
across to the left side, where it makes another 
turn and goes down to the outlet. It is alto¬ 
gether about six feet long and is much wider than 
the small intestine. By the peculiar arrange¬ 
ment of its muscular fibers the colon is in some 
places much smaller than in others, thus forming 
a series of pouches, so that any material that has 
passed from the small intestines into it is delayed 
until the nourishment remaining in it has been 
absorbed. 



CHAPTER XIII. 


THE FORCE-PUMP. 

I N the very center of our bodily dwelling we 
have a strong force pump that sends fluids to 
all parts of the house. It is located in the third 
story, or thorax, and is so wonderful that I am 
sure we shall delight to study it. It is about as 
big as your fist and is conical in shape. It lies 
obliquely in the thorax with the base uppermost 
and toward the right, while the point touches 
the left side between the fifth and sixth ribs. 
A bright little boy who was asked where the 
heart was located exclaimed, “ O I know. It 
is north of the stomach. ” 

Put your chin down on your chest as low as you 
can ; now place the wrist of your right hand on 
this point, with your finger tips about over the 
fifth rib on the left side, and you will see just 
about where the heart lies. “ O, ” you say, “the 
heart cannot be away up there, for we feel it 
beat down on the side, and not at all up in the 
middle of the chest ! ” That is because the tip of 
the heart comes close to the walls of the thorax 

[69] 


70 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


and touches them at every beat, while the base 
lies back of the lungs and its beating cannot be 
felt, though it can be heard if you will listen at 
this point. 

This little pump begins to work long before 
Aura comes rushing into the lungs, and it is the 
last organ of the body to stop working. In very 
small children it works very fast, perhaps mak¬ 
ing one hundred and thirty strokes a minute, but 
it gets over its hurry as people grow older, and 
in adults it usually beats about seventy-five times 
a minute; however, that differs in different 
people. If you put your finger on your wrist on 
the thumb side, you can feel the beating of the 
pulse, caused by the stroke of the heart sending 
the blood through the arteries. 

The heart is a hollow muscle, but it is not 
like the muscles on the outside of the body. 
These are controlled by the will, but we have 
not been given control of the beating of the 
heart. And that is a fine thing for us, for if we 
had to manage it all the time, we should be able 
to do little else. We could not go to bed, as we 
do now, and sleep soundly, feeling sure that this 
little force-pump would work away all night just 
as it had worked all day. Does it never rest, 
then ? O yes, it rests between beats. It makes 
a stroke, and then it rests, then it beats again, 



THE FORCE-PUMP. 


71 


and so it keeps on from the first moment of life 
to its end. It does not get much rest, does it ? 
and yet I think it rests more than you may im¬ 
agine. It is calculated that it rests about two- 
fifths of the time, which really makes about nine 
hours in twenty-four. 

I think you will be surprised to learn what 
a vast amount of work the heart does. As I 
said, it is a hollow muscle, and is divided into 
two parts, a right and left heart, as we say. 
Now, do n’t tell somebody that I said we have a 
heart on the right side, and another on the left 
side, for that is not true. We have a right and a 
left heart, but both are enclosed in a sac, the 
pericardium , which means around the heart. 
Each division is again divided ; the upper part on 
each side is called the auricle, and the lower one, 
the ventricle. The right and left sides of the 
heart are entirely separate from each other with 
no door of communication between, but the 
auricle of each side is connected with the ven¬ 
tricle of the same side by an opening, and this 
opening is closed by gates called valves, which 
are really folds of the membrane lining the heart. 
These gates swing from the auricles into the ven¬ 
tricles, but never the other way because fleshy 
strings are fastened to them that let them swing 
only until their points come together, thus en- 



72 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


tirely closing the opening. Some physiologists 
maintain that these valves act as a sort of hollow 
piston to push the blood along, and this is an¬ 
other reason why we may call the heart a force- 
pump. 

But how much work is done by the heart in 
twenty-four hours ? Physiologists differ in their 
calculations ; but if we suppose each side of the 
heart holds six ounces, and the beats are seventy 
in a minute, we can come pretty near finding 
out what it does. Supposing you work at that 
problem and see if the heart does not move 
about eighteen tons of blood in a day. But if it 
moves eighteen tons a day, that does not accu¬ 
rately measure the force it uses, for we must 
multiply the weight by the distance it is lifted. 
If we say we lift one pound one foot high, we 
know just exactly what we do, and we call this 
a foot-pound. If we lift four pounds four feet 
high, it is the same as lifting one pound sixteen 
feet high, or sixteen pounds one foot high, and 
so we call it sixteen foot-pounds. At every beat 
of the heart six ounces are sent from the left 
ventricle into the large artery called the aorta. 
If there were no walls to confine it, we are told 
that the blood would jet six feet high at each 
stroke, so you see that at each heart beat, 
enough force is used to send six ounces six feet 



THE FORCE-PUMP. 


73 


high ; or, to put it the other way, it could send 
thirty-six ounces one foot high or one ounce 
thirty-six feet high. Thirty-six ounces are two 
and a quarter pounds, so, saying the heart beats 
seventy times a minute, we multiply two and a 
quarter by seventy, and find that force enough is 
used to send one hundred and fifty-seven and a 
half pounds one foot high, or one pound one 
hundred and fifty-seven and a half feet high. 
Now go on with the problem. Multiply one 
hundred and fifty-seven and a half by sixty min¬ 
utes in the hour, and that by twenty-four, the 
hours in a day, and the result is 226,800 foot¬ 
pounds lifted by the left ventricle alone. 

The walls of the left ventricle are thicker and 
stronger than those of the right, because it must 
send blood to all parts of the body, while the 
right ventricle only sends it to the lungs. A 
rough estimate of the work of both ventricles to¬ 
gether would make the heart use as much force 
each day as would lift a man weighing 150 
pounds 2000 feet or nearly half a mile into the 
air. What a marvelous little force-pump the 
heart is ! Should we not use it well and give it 
time to rest ? Count your pulse when you are 
lying down, and then when sitting up, then 
when standing, then after you have been run¬ 
ning, and you will understand why the heart will 



74 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


rest much faster when you are lying down. We 
need to exercise, to make the heart send the 
blood vigorously to all parts of the body, and 
then we need to lie down and sleep that it may 
have time to rest and gain strength for a new 
day. 



CHAPTER XIV. 


THE GENERAL MANAGER. 

1 FANCY your father would think he had made 
a fine bargain if, when he bought a house, he 
should be told that all he would need to do to 
keep it in repair would be to bring the mortar, 
glass, nails, wood, and other materials, and the 
house would help itself to all that was necessary. 
In truth, that is all we have to do to keep our 
bodily house in good order. We cannot furnish 
the glass but we must furnish the material out of 
which glass is made. We do not furnish bone 
but the material from which bone can be made, 
and so it is with every part of the house. And 
if we do not furnish the right kind of material in 
the right quantity, the house falls into decay, or 
goes out of repair, and this we call being sick. 

In our homes there is usually some one who 
superintends the housekeeping. Have we no 
such general manager in our bodily dwelling? — 
O yes, indeed. Her name is Blood, and a very 
active, busy little worker she is, if we give her 
half a chance. She goes about the house day 

[75] 


76 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


and night, never stopping, but seeing that every¬ 
thing is put in order. If I were to paint her pic¬ 
ture it would be as a jolly, round little body, 
with a scarlet dress, and a white cap on her 
head. 

A large passage called the aorta leads from 
the left side of the heart, and this divides and 
subdivides into many small halls, called arteries, 
and these into still smaller ones, called arteri¬ 
oles, and these again into some so small that 
they are known as capillaries, a word meaning 
hairs. These capillaries are found in every part 
and every organ of the body. When we stick a 
pin into the skin, and it bleeds, it is because we 
have pierced a capillary. These capillaries are 
gathered up in the larger vessels or tubes, called 
veins, and these into still larger ones, until at 
last two large veins, the vena cavae ascendens 
and the vena cavae descendens , enter the right 
side of the heart. 

The arteries carry pure blood and may be 
likened to water pipes. The veins carry impure 
blood and are, therefore, like drainage pipes. 
So you see the arteries and veins belong to the 
plumbing of the house; and as it is through them 
that blood goes to all parts of the body, we 
could not very well describe them until we came 
to talk of our general manager. 



THE GENERAL MANAGER. 


77 


The blood is composed of cells or corpuscles, 
some red and some white, about one white one 
to six hundred red ones, and that is why I said 
the dress of the housekeeper was red and her cap 
was white. These corpuscles float in a watery 
fluid called serum, and in shape are like pieces 
of money hollowed out on both sides. They 
seem to be alive, and find their way in crowds 
through the arteries down into the tiny capillaries 
where they have to go in single file. These cor¬ 
puscles carry the oxygen and all the material 
needed to build up the body, and when they go 
into the capillaries, they slip through the walls, 
one by one, into the tissues and there give up 
the food they have brought. The dead, or waste 
matter, slips through the walls into the blood, 
then it is carried to the heart by the veins, and 
from here the blood goes to the lungs where it is 
cleansed, as we learned in reading of the laundry; 
and goes back to the left heart and starts out 
again on its round through the body, and this 
is the way our bodily housekeeping is done. 

Blood carries with her a peculiar substance 
called fibrin which prevents her running away. 
It might almost be called her conscience. You 
know that sometimes when you are tempted to 
do a wrong, there is something in you that stops 
you. Perhaps you think you will play truant, 



78 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


but this invisible something seems to tie your 
feet and you cannot go. We call this con¬ 
science. The fibrin of the blood is that substance 
which forms a clot. You have perhaps seen a 
clot of blood, but have not thought how impor¬ 
tant it is that blood should clot, or coagulate, 
as it is called. If freshly drawn blood is 
whipped with twigs, we can see in it little fine 
white threads. This is 
the fibrin, and is what 
makes a wound stop 
bleeding of its own ac¬ 
cord, by catching the red 
corpuscles and forming 
the clot. It is just as if 
Blood carried strings in 
her pocket, and when she 
finds a temptation to run 
away through an open 
door, she ties her own feet so she cannot go. 

You will readily understand that Blood never 
rests. Night and day she hastens on her round 
of duties. She starts out rather briskly impelled 
by the force of the heart, perhaps at the rate of 
ten or twelve inches per second, but in the cap¬ 
illaries she does not go faster than one inch a 
minute, for here it is that the real work of the 
housekeeping is done, and she must go more 




THE GENERAL MANAGER. 


79 


slowly in order to attend to business. When she 
gets to the veins, she finds little gates or valves 
that shut behind her and prevent her going 
back even if she wanted to. Here she cannot 
feel the impulse of the heart so strongly to hurry 
her along, and if she is away down in the feet, she 
has a long distance to climb ; but the valves 
close behind her, and if we are exercising, the 
muscles press upon the veins and hurry her 
along. The action of the lungs in breathing gives 
her a new impulse, and the suction of the right 
auricle after it empties itself into the right ven¬ 
tricle, calls her forward, and so Blood is impelled 
through the veins to the heart. Sometimes, 
Blood gets very much excited because some 
enemy has come into the house which she is very 
anxious to get rid of, and she rushes through the 
halls very fast, and gets everything stirred up into 
a great state of excitement which we call a fever; 
and unless something is done to make her cool 
down and move a little more gently, Man may 
actually be compelled to move out of his house 
and leave it. 



CHAPTER XV. 


THE SERVANTS. 

W E may, in a general way, call the hands and 
feet servants, but they are only automatic 
servants obeying Man’s will as machines; we 
will therefore think of them only as appendages. 
Did you never wish that a dish-washing machine 
could be invented ? Well, you see that in your 
hands you have a most complete one. Nothing 
could be made so perfectly adapted to its various 
uses as the human hand with its bony frame¬ 
work, muscular machinery, and electric wires of 
the nerves. Man is the animal with the thumb, 
and the possession of that little organ gives him 
great superiority. Experiment, and see how few 
things you could do well if you had no thumb, 
and you will come to prize that part of your hand 
more than you have ever done before. 

But we are now going to talk of the servants 
of our bodily dwelling. The principal servants 
are the cells, and marvelous little creatures they 
are. Cells are little sacs containing a jelly-like 
fluid which looks much like the white of an egg ; 
[80] 


THE SERVANTS. 


81 


they are so very small that over three thousand 
of them could be laid side by side in the space 
of an inch. There are bone cells, nerve cells, 
muscle cells, brain cells, and blood cells. These 
have the power of changing their form, of select¬ 
ing their own food out of the general mass, and 
each particular cell understands and does its own 
peculiar work. Activity of the body, speech, 
thought, or feeling, changes or destroys cells, but, 
in a very strange way, the destroyed cells ap¬ 
point, or rather create successors exactly like 
themselves, so that while we are continually 
dying, we are continually being made over 
anew. 

You may call these cells, then, general serv¬ 
ants, each having a certain line of work to do, 
and doing the work always as perfectly as possible 
with the materials furnished. The general man¬ 
ager, Blood, brings material to the tissues, and 
the bone-cells select from it the different forms 
of lime, magnesia, and soda that are needed to 
build up the bones and keep them in good order, 
while from the same store of material the mus¬ 
cles and the nerves search for the albumen, gly¬ 
cogen, and other material which they need. 
Each cell has its own time to die. Some, as in 
the intestines, live only from twelve to twenty- 
four hours ; others, as those of the bones, may 
6 



82 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


live for years. You see, then, that where they 
have the most work to do, they die soonest. 

Cells are constantly busy with different kinds 
of work. First, we may say their work is to ab¬ 
sorb nutrient material, each tissue searching out 
that which it especially needs. Second, their 
work is to make that material over into some 
part of the body, but, of course, in putting in new 
material in any part of the body, the dead ma¬ 
terial must be removed, and so, third, a part 
of cell work is to separate waste matter that is of 
no further use and cast it out, just as the work¬ 
men gather up the pieces of lime and mortar or 
broken glass after they have done a job of re¬ 
pairing. Fourth, cell work is to increase the 
size of the organs. In people who have their 
growth, the cells have only to remove the worn- 
out matter and put in new; but children are 
growing all the time, so, in them, the cells must 
be continually adding new material. 

All over the body these tiny, living cells are 
busy, busy; the liver cells are making bile, liver 
sugar, and separating waste matter ; the cells of 
the glands are making saliva, gastric juice, and 
other digestive fluids, and other cells are making 
the coloring matter that paints our skin. 

If the body is injured, the cells at the border 
of the wound go to work to heal it by filling up 



THE SERVANTS. 


83 


the space with new material. We talk some¬ 
times about salves and ointments having healing 
power, but the healing power really lies in the 
ability of the cells to make new tissue. 

Cells are often very kind and helpful and will 
undertake to work for each other. Thus, if the 
skin has been chilled, the mucous membrane 
will try to do the work for it, and that is why 
there is such an increase of mucus in the nose 
or bronchial tubes when we have a cold. If the 
kidneys do not work well, the skin tries to help 
throw out the waste matter, and so we find all 
over the house the various servants are kindly 
helping each other, for they are all related, and 
they seem to know that if any are sick they will 
all soon suffer. 

In the study of the dining-room we learned how 
the food was carried into the blood, and now we 
learn how and why blood is carried everywhere 
throughout the body. You remember that blood 
can open a door at any point along the walls of 
the blood vessels and slip into the tissues. No 
doubt more blood will pass into the tissues than 
they need, and this excess must be removed, so 
we look for the machinery that is to remove it, 
and we find it in the system of lymphatic glands 
and vessels that we talked about a little when 
learning of the lacteals. 



84 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


These lymphatics take up the excess of blood, 
and with it any waste material that it has picked 
up. This forms what is called lymph, and it 
is worked over in the lymphatic glands so it can 
be used again. Our divine Architect teaches us 
a lesson in economy ; nothing is wasted, but 
everything that can be of service is made over 
and is used again. I have seen people who 
seemed to think it an evidence of greatness to be 
extravagant, but after all, in spite of themselves, 
they were making over material and using it a 
second time in their bodily dwelling. I wonder 
if they would have thought less of themselves if 
they had known how busy the lymphatics were, 
gathering up the remnants and making new blood 
out of them. It seems to me that if God, who 
has all resources at his command, can think of 
economy in his work, we ought to be proud to 
economize, and boast rather of what we save 
than of what we spend. 



CHAPTER XVI. 


THE PURIFYING APPARATUS. 

B ETWEEN the windows of the eyes begins 
the sloping roof of the porch we call^the 
nose, covering the two circular doorways through 
which the good fairy Aura goes in and out of the 
house. This porch has a bony, cartilaginous 
framework and muscular walls. Its interior is 
divided into two passages called the nasal fosses. 
These passages, like all cavities opening to the 
air, are lined with mucous membrane which 
secretes the semi-fluid called mucus. It used 
to be thought that this mucus in the nose 
came from the brain, but a man named Schnei¬ 
der discovered that it was made by this mem¬ 
brane, and it is therefore called the Schneiderian 
membrane. 

Aura mounts the dark stairway, not hindered 
by the hairy guards stationed there to keep out 
intruders; she descends through the winding 
passages into the hall of the pharynx, and, 
crossing the head of the kitchen stairs, she lifts 
the little trap-door called the epiglottis and goes 

[85] 


86 


OUR BODiLY DWELLING . 


down another stairway, the trachea, into the 
laundry, or lungs, which occupy the larger part 
of the third story of the house, known as the 
thorax. This stairway of the trachea differs from 
that which leads down into the kitchen in the 
fact that the walls are firm and do not lie close 
together as do the walls of the esophagus. 

The trachea, sometimes called the wind-pipe, 
is about four and a half inches long. At the top 
of it is the wonderful musical instrument, the 
larynx, through which Aura gently passes, us¬ 
ually making no noise. At the bottom of the 
trachea two passages branch out to the right and 
left. These are called the bronchial tubes. 
They divide and subdivide into still smaller tubes 
until they become exceedingly fine, but still Aura 
finds her way through them to the place where 
each ends in a small room known as a pulmonary 
lobule, where are placed the stationary tubs or 
air cells. 

Here it is that the most wonderful washing 
process takes place, the washing of the blood by 
the air. We may perhaps think that if Aura is 
a fairy she will not do such menial work as wash¬ 
ing, but that which she does is like the wonder¬ 
ful stories we read, where the fairy waves a wand 
and says, “ abracadabra, presto change and all 
is done. 



THE PURIFYING APPARATUS. 


87 


Monday is often spoken of as the day when 
there are “picked up” dinners, and all sorts of 
discomforts. In some parts of the old world, 
washing-day comes once in three months among 
the poorer people, and once a year among the 
rich, and then a great ado is raised. Numbers 
of washer-women are called in, big fires are built, 
and there is a rubbing and scrubbing that goes 
on for a week before all the soiled clothes 
that have accumulated during the year are 
cleansed. 

But every day is wash-day in our bodily-dwell¬ 
ing, and if the other business of the house were 
much disturbed by the process, we should be in 
“hot water,” or “suds’’all the time. But in 
truth the work goes on so quietly and systemat¬ 
ically that we think little about it, although we 
become much distressed if, for any reason, Aura 
is interfered with in her work. In order to un¬ 
derstand what she does, we will have to learn 
a little more about the structure and purpose of 
the lungs. First let me point out to you that 
the trachea is made with firm walls, but the 
rings of cartilage do not go all the way around, 
for if they did they might interfere with the 
working of the esophagus, and prevent the food 
from passing down into the stomach ; so, just 
at the back, where the esophagus and trachea 



88 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


lie together, the cartilaginous rings of the trachea 
are finished by muscular fibers. 

The walls of the bronchial tubes are stiffened 
with cartilage so that they will stay open. All 
these passages are lined with mucous membrane, 
and here are stationed very fine and delicate 
attendants called cilia, who keep up a constant 
bowing motion toward the trachea, and so help 
Aura to get back again to the outer world. 

The bronchial tubes and the air cells make up 
the lungs, hung like two air bags in the cavity 
of the thorax. This cavity is lined with a mem¬ 
brane called the pleura which is reflected back 
and covers the lungs. This membrane secretes 
a fluid that makes the lungs move easily as the 
two coats of the pleura play upon each other 
in breathing. 

You have not forgotten that the thorax is 
framed with the spine and sternum connected by 
the ribs, twelve on each side. These ribs are so 
attached to the spine and sternum that they-are 
to quite a degree movable, and the strong mus¬ 
cles are so arranged as to lift them upward and 
outward at each breath. When those lift, the 
cavity of the chest grows larger, and this is an 
invitation to Aura to come in and fill the space, 
which she quietly does. But the cavity is en¬ 
larged not only from side to side, but from above 
and downward. 



THE PURIFYING APPARATUS . 


89 


The floor of the thorax is a strong, muscular 
partition that acts also as a roof or ceiling 
to the abdominal cavity. There are openings 
through it for the kitchen stairs and for some of 
the plumbing and electric wires, but it closes 
tightly around these so that there are no open 
spaces in it. This muscular partition is called 
the diaphragm, and it is a very important breath¬ 
ing muscle. The floor formed by it is like a 
dome swelling up into *the thorax. It is fastened 
along the lower border of the ribs, thus making 
the front side shorter than the back. When we 
breathe in, it flattens or grows “taut,” as a 
sailor would say, and the sides push outward. 
When we breathe out it relaxes and rises in the 
centre and the sides come in. An idea of the 
movements of the diaphragm may be obtained 
by opening and shutting an umbrella. When 
you open the umbrella, its diameter increases 
and the silk is tightly stretched. When you 
partly close it, the diameter is shortened and the 
silk is loose. If you had an elastic cylinder 
around the umbrella, you see it would need to 
stretch a good deal as the umbrella opens. The 
body is an elastic cylinder around the diaphragm 
and naturally stretches when breath is taken in, 
and the diaphragm grows tense and spreads. 

If tight clothing is worn, the body cannot 
stretch, and the action of the diaphragm is inter- 



90 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


fered with, the lungs are not completely filled 
with air, and serious results follow. In this 
case, the lungs trying to take in all the air pos¬ 
sible, make great effort. The upper muscles of 
the thorax work harder to lift the ribs further, 
and we have a great heaving of the chest. Some 
people have supposed that because women 
breathe in this way it is proof that this is a 
feminine style of breathing, but, in truth, it is 
only an effort to take air into the lungs that are 
so compressed by bands or tight clothing that 
they cannot expand at the lower part as they 
should. It has been learned that a man dressed 
in the same way will breathe with the upper 
part of his chest, in the so-called feminine 
fashion. 

We sometimes hear women say that they can¬ 
not sit up unless they have on corsets to support 
them. If we should see a person putting an iron 
band around his dwelling, and he should tell us 
that it would not stand up without this band, we 
should at once say that he must have employed 
a very poor builder, but we know that our divine 
Architect does not do such poor work ; and if 
the bodily house cannot stand erect without 
stays, it is because the muscular walls have not 
been used, and thereby have become weak. 
Now that girls are using their muscles, we find 



THE PURIFYING APPARATUS. 


91 


that they, like boys, can grow up with firm walls 
that will hold them up without external aid. 

But some people have an idea that the body 
is not so beautiful if left as the Creator made it, 
as when it is made over and drawn in to give a 
slender effect. If we take a peep inside and see 
what is done to the internal organs, I think we 
shall come to have a different idea of beauty. 
We are not fond of tiny rooms in our dwellings; 
we don’t like to have the furniture all crowded 
so closely together that we can hardly walk 
through. We never hear people boast of how 
small a house they have, unless it is their bodily 
house they are talking of; and then they some¬ 
times like to tell how they can squeeze it into 
the smallest possible compass just over the rooms 
that contain the most precious furniture. The 
lower part of the laundry is thus compressed so 
that Aura cannot get in, the working of the 
force-pump of the heart is hindered, the kitchen 
is squeezed so that it cannot churn the food 
properly, and the furnace and sugar manufactory 
of the liver is pressed quite out of place ; and 
perhaps, worst of all, the dining room is pressed 
down out of the proper place in^ the abdominal 
cavity until it rests upon the contents of the pel¬ 
vic cavity, thus creating a great deal of pain and 
trouble. 



92 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


Is it not queer that women, who are such ex¬ 
cellent housekeepers and who are so distressed if 
their dwellings are out of order, should so persist 
in disarranging the furniture of their bodily 
houses and claim that it adds to their beauty ? 
I think, however, that it is because they have not 
studied the construction of their own bodies. 
I am sure that you who know about the marvels 
of yourself and the work that is being done in 
your body, will not interfere with the efforts of 
the kind servants who work night and day to 
keep you alive, by making them live and labor 
in a room so small and restricted that they can¬ 
not do their work well. 

In order that you may understand the wonder¬ 
ful washing that goes on in the laundry, we shall 
have to study about the changes that take place 
in the blood that make it need cleansing. I 
have told you that we are constantly dying, and 
one office of the blood is to gather up the little 
dead particles that result from all the activities 
of life. These dead atoms exist in a form called 
carbonic acid gas, and are produced by a waste 
of the tissues; the blood also brings back to 
the tissues that which will replace what they 
have lost, and this is another gas called oxygen. 
The blood comes into the lungs dark and impure ; 
it gives up its impurities, and by the action of 



THE PURIFYING APPARATUS. 


93 


oxygen is changed from its dark color to a bright 
scarlet. This is the washing process. There is 
no rubbing and boiling and rinsing and starching, 
and, after the washing is done, no scrubbing to 
do. The blood runs through minute channels in 
the membrane of the air cells, and the air fills the 
cells on the other side of the membrane. The 
carbonic acid gas slips through the membrane 
from the blood into the air, and the oxygen slips 
through the membrane from the air into the 
blood, and the washing is done. 

Eighteen or twenty times a minute Aura 
comes in bringing in the supplies of oxygen and 
goes out with the carbonic acid gas, and the 
more deeply we breathe, the more perfect will be 
the cleansing of the blood. 

Dr. J. H. Kellogg says that every time we 
breathe we spoil at least a half barrel of air, or 
six hundred barrels every hour. This gives us a 
very good idea of how needful it is to have some 
way of letting pure air into the rooms we inhabit. 
If every door and window is tightly closed, and 
the fire and lights are burning, using up our oxy¬ 
gen as they must in order to burn, we cannot 
wonder if we have a headache, and feel stupid, for 
we are poisoned by breathing in the waste matter 
from our own lungs, because we are not taking 
in oxygen to give us new material. Tracy says 



94 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


that a five-foot gas burner creates as much car¬ 
bonic acid gas as five men. 

When we say that we spoil one half barrel of 
air at every breath we, of course, do not mean 
that we breathe out that much, for the lungs do 
not hold more than one and a half gallons of air, 
and we do not empty them fully at each breath. 
About two- thirds of a pint of air is taken in and 
breathed out in moderate breathing, and this we 
call tidal air because it ebbs and flows like the 
tide. When we run or exercise briskly the heart 
beats faster, the lungs work hafder, and we take 
in more air, five times as much, perhaps, and 
this is called complemental air. When we 
breathe out this fuller amount, it is called reserve 
air, because we had it reserved for some special 
occasion which demands more than the ordinary 
tidal air. But after we have breathed out all 
that we possibly can, there still remains as much 
more that we can by no means empty out of the 
lungs, and this is called residual air. Residual 
means that which remains, so we can see why it 
gets that name. 

The question may arise in your minds, how 
can oxygen get to the little tubs of the air cells 
to wash the blood, if not more than one tenth of 
the air is changed at every breath ? I will see if 
I can explain that. You see that the air going 



THE PURIFYING APPARATUS. 


95 


out of the lungs is not like people going out of a 
room, where those near the door must go out 
first before those at the further side of the room 
can go out. To explain the change of air in 
breathing we must study the law of diffusion of 
gases. That sounds as if it might be very hard 
to learn, but like many other things it is much 
easier than you might think. Gases are very 
light substances, lighter than air. Indeed, air 
is made of gases, oxygen one part, nitrogen four 
parts, with a small amount of carbonic acid gas. 
The gases are all very friendly and mix readily 
with each other, until the same amount of each 
is found in every part of the vessel containing 
them. 

The air which comes into the lungs has a large 
amount of oxygen, and that which remains in 
the lungs has quite an amount of carbonic acid 
gas, which it has taken from the blood. The 
air that is breathed out has less oxygen and more 
carbonic acid gas. As the air was breathed in, 
the gases began to mingle all through the lungs 
until they were equally distributed, and then the 
oxygen that was near the walls of the air cells 
passed through them into the blood, and so we 
see that although the lungs are never entirely 
emptied, yet the whole volume of air is changed 
at each breath. 



96 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


The walls of the air cells are so thin that ten 
of them would not be thicker than this paper; 
and if all that are contained in one pair of lungs 
could be spread out over a flat surface, it would 
cover a space equal to 150 by 160 feet. You see 
there are about 600,000,000 of these little tubs 
in our laundry, and each one made of this deli¬ 
cate membrane, so we can get an idea of the 
amount of washing done at each breath. 

But if we send out so much carbonic acid gas 
at each breath, how does the outside air keep 
pure ? Because the trees and plants take up 
the carbonic acid gas and give out oxygen, and 
so they purify the air which we pollute. That is 
why the air of the country seems so sweet and 
pure, and why plants and “green things grow¬ 
ing” are so necessary in cities. Little parks 
in the midst of great cities are not only a 
beauty but a need, and plants in houses help to 
purify the air as well as to make the home look 
bright. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THE HEATING APPARATUS. 

T HERE are many remarkable things about the 
body, as you have already learned ; but I 
have one more marvel to tell you now, and it 
is that no matter how cold or how hot the 
weather, our bodily temperature remains about 
the same, and we begin to ask, Where are the 
stoves that keep it warm ? 

Some dwellings are heated by hot air from a 
furnace, others by steam, others by natural gas, 
or wood, or coal burned in stoves or open grates. 
Our wonderful house has a combination of meth¬ 
ods. We all know that a fire will not burn un¬ 
less it has air. In the process of burning, the 
oxygen of the air unites with the carbon of the 
fuel. This is called oxidation, and by it car¬ 
bonic acid gas and other products are formed. 
Again we find our good fairy Aura with her as¬ 
sistant, Oxygen, helping to keep us warm. Oxida¬ 
tion is a chemical process, and chemical processes 
are always accompanied with the formation of 
heat. Foods, as we have seen, consist of 

[ 97 ] 


7 


98 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. These 
are taken into the body and undergo a process 
by which the carbon and hydrogen unite to form 
carbonic acid gas, and the hydrogen and oxygen 
unite to form water. This process is called 
oxidation of the tissues ; and, as it goes on in 
every cell, we may call the cells little stoves. 

In our study of the lungs we learned that oxy¬ 
gen is taken in and carbonic acid gas given out 
at every breath, and this process keeps up the 
fires all over the body in these little cell stoves. 
We might almost call the lungs and the pores the 
stove-pipes which carry off the smoke and bad 
gases. The greater the quantity of the food that 
is assimilated, the greater the amount of carbonic 
acid gas thrown off. The more a man exercises 
the more the cells will have to do to repair waste, 
so we learn how exercise makes us warm, since 
it causes the cells to work harder, to die sooner, 
and to demand more new material through the 
food for repair, and this demand we call hunger. 

We can also understand why we are cold when 
we sit still. We do not take enough oxygen in 
the lungs to feed the stoves, and the lungs do 
not carry out the waste material very fast ; the 
cells, not being called on to work very fast, do not 
generate much heat. They live longer but they 
are only half alive. 



THE HEATING APPARATUS . 


99 


If exercise produces heat, we can readily under¬ 
stand that active muscles are great sources of 
heat production. By pressure on the blood ves¬ 
sels they increase circulation, and this brings more 
oxygen to the tissues. Exercise uses up the tis¬ 
sue cells and they call for new material from the 
blood, so you see heat is created by this process 
of decomposition or combustion, as we may call 
it. Physiologists estimate that four fifths of the 
heat of the healthy body is produced by the mus¬ 
cles. If you are cold and are sitting still you can 
know that the fire in your cell stoves has died 
down very low, and the quickest way to rekindle 
it is to exercise briskly. Get up, shake your 
hands and feet, run, jump, and call the general 
manager, Blood, to go rapidly through the house 
and look after the fire, rake out the cinders and 
ashes, and bring new fuel, and soon the pipes of 
the lungs will carry out the deadly gases, and 
Oxygen comes in and starts the fire to burning 
brightly. If the temperature is raised by exer¬ 
cise, it will not fall under an hour and a half, so 
we can understand that to sit still longer than 
that period of time will probably result in a slow¬ 
ing of the circulation that will make us feel 
cold. 

Digestion is a chemical process, so we will not 
be surprised to learn that it produces heat. 
L. of C. 



100 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


Some particular kinds of food produce more heat 
than others, and these are the foods in which 
there is a superabundance of carbon. 

I told you that the blood slips through the walls 
of the blood vessels into the tissues, and waste 
material passes from the tissues through the walls 
into the blood, and also that the oxygen goes 
through the membranes. This is called osmosis , 
the passage of fluids or gases through animal 
membrane. When the blood goes into the tis¬ 
sues, it is called endosmosis; the waste material 
goes out of the tissues to the blood, and this is 
called exosmosis. This process is accompanied 
with the formation of heat. 

Glands are organs that take material from the 
blood and make out of it new material, so the 
gland cells are also stoves. Mental exertion 
produces heat. The brain of a man that is 
thinking is warmer than that of a man that is 
sleeping, so the brain cells are stoves too. The 
liver is the largest gland of the body, and in its 
work a large amount of heat is produced so we 
may call the liver a furnace. It does various 
kinds of work. It manufactures sugar and gly¬ 
cogen, and one always needs a fire in a manu¬ 
factory, you know. It excretes waste matters 
and secretes bile, and these processes are chem¬ 
ical and produce heat, so we need not be sur- 



THE HEATING APPARATUS. 


101 


prised to learn that the liver is the warmest part 
of the body. 

Perhaps it would be well to tell you just here 
the difference between excretion and secre¬ 
tion. Excretion is taking material from the 
blood and casting it out of the body unchanged. 
The kidneys are excretory organs. Secretion is 
taking material from the blood and making out 
of it a new material. The liver is both an excre¬ 
tory and a secretory organ. 

Do you ask if clothes do not make us warm ? 
I answer that they keep us warm but they make 
no heat. They only retain the heat which our 
body makes, and the poorer conductors of heat 
they are, the better they will keep us warm. 
Linen is a very good conductor of heat and takes 
it away from the body so fast that it is not a 
very good article of clothing. Cotton is not so 
good a conductor as linen, but better than 
woolen, so cotton does not keep us as warm as 
woolen. 

Our bodily temperature is about 98 degrees 
Fahrenheit (that means by the thermometer in¬ 
vented by a man named Fahrenheit), though it 
varies somewhat during the day. As we eat and 
exercise, the temperature of the body rises and 
reaches its greatest height between five and eight 
in the evening. While we are quietly sleeping 



102 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


it falls, and is lowest from two to six in the 
morning. If we sleep in the day and work in 
the night, this will be reversed. The skin is the 
regulator of temperature; if we get too warm, 
all the little doors of the skin are opened, and 
water is poured out on the surface to cool us off. 



The Skin and its Plumbing. 










CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE LABORATORY, MANUFACTORY, AND 
STORE-HOUSE. 

A CHEMIST is one who analyzes substances, 
or takes them to pieces and finds out of 
what they are made. He learns that the hu¬ 
man body contains iron, soda, potash, albumen, 
and a great variety of other substances ; and then 
he takes all of these substances to pieces and 
finds that they are made of oxygen, hydrogen, 
nitrogen, and carbon put together in various pro¬ 
portions. For example : two parts of hydrogen 
and one of oxygen form water; nearly four of 
nitrogen and one of oxygen form common air. 

The work of the chemist is done in a room 
called a laboratory. He does not find it diffi¬ 
cult to take things to pieces, and he can unite 
many substances and form new ones ; but he has 
not yet learned how to give life to the substances 
which he forms. He may take of the elements 
of the human body in the right proportion and 
put them together, and yet he will not have 

[103] 


104 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


a living body. There are vital processes as well 
as chemical processes. 

We know that chemical changes are going on 
in all parts of the body all the time, so that the 
whole body might truly be called a laboratory, 
but I have given the name in this chapter to one 
especial organ which combines in itself a chemical 
laboratory, manufactory, and a store-house. This 
organ is known as the liver. It is the largest 
organ in the body,*lies on the right side, close up 
under the diaphragm, and fastened to it by liga¬ 
ments, so that it rises and falls with every move¬ 
ment of the diaphragm in breathing. Wonderful 
work goes on in this organ, but before speak¬ 
ing of it more particularly, I shall be obliged 
to tell you something about the portal circula¬ 
tion. 

In the chapter on the General Manager, we 
saw how Blood started from the left side of the 
heart and found her way into the farthest ex¬ 
tremities. All the blood does not go down to 
the feet, but some of it takes a short cut across 
to the liver through a union of the intestinal 
blood vessels, forming what is called the portal 
circulation. Through this some products of di¬ 
gestion go directly to the liver and pass through 
certain changes before being thrown into the circu¬ 
lation. A piece of liver has no great beauty until 
we come to examine it under the microscope, 



LABORATORY AND STORE-HOUSE. 


105 


then we find much in its complicated structure 
to admire. It consists of lobes which are made 
up of innumerable small lobules, and the veins 
wind about these lobules and between the lobes, 
and from these numerous capillaries are given off, 
until the whole 
looks almost 
like lace-work. 

This system of 
lobules, capilla¬ 
ries, and veins 
is engaged in a 
variety of work. 

In that part 
which we may 
call the labora¬ 
tory, blood cor- 
p u s c 1 e s are 
broken up and 
urea is formed, 
these decomposed red corpuscles material is 
obtained for the manufacture of bile, another 
illustration of the economy of nature. 

The liver also has the power of taking care of 
the poisonous materials which are brought with 
the blood and are a result of the breaking up of 
tissue in all parts of the body. Objectionable 
substances which have been taken in with the 
food may also be taken charge of by the liver. 





Lobule of Liver Microscopically 
Examined. 


It is supposed that out of 




106 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


One great office of the liver is the manufactur¬ 
ing of bile, which is secreted continually and 
stored up in the little reservoir called the gall 
bladder. During digestion the greatest amount 
of bile is poured out, and during fasting it may 
entirely cease. A free use of water increases the 
secretion of bile. The amount is also influenced 
by the quantity of food we eat ; the largest 
amount is made when we eat flesh food, a 
less amount with vegetable food, and a very 
small amount with pure fats. We learned 
much of the office of the bile in the chapter on 
the store-room. 

The liver also makes what is known as glyco¬ 
gen, a kind of animal starch. You remember 
that all starchy foods must be changed into sugar 
before they can be absorbed, and the liver takes 
this sugar, makes it into glycogen, and stores it 
up until needed for use in the body, so we see it 
becomes a store-house. The amount of glycogen 
is increased by the use of starchy foods or of 
foods containing a large amount of sugar. 

The movements of the diaphragm assist in 
forcing the bile out into the excretory duct. A 
relatively small amount of restraint will cause 
the bile to stagnate in the bile duct, and this fact 
is of importance when we remember that the 
pressure of tight clothing comes directly over the 



LABORATORY AND STORE-HOUSE. 


107 


liver. It must not be forgotten that interfer¬ 
ence with the excretion of bile will be an in¬ 
terference with the process of digestion and 
absorption, and therefore have a serious effect 
upon the general health. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE HOUSEKEEPER’S CLOSETS. 

Y OU may be a frequent and familiar guest in 
a household, and feel free to wander through 
its various apartments at will. You visit not 
only the library and the living room as you wish, 
but you go to the dining-room and kitchen. 
Perhaps the housekeeper shows you with pride 
her linen closet and her china closet, or the one 
where her canned fruit is stored, but in all proba¬ 
bility she does not open to your explorations the 
closet where she keeps the rag-bag or the half- 
worn clothes she intends to remodel. There are 
some processes in her housekeeping that she 
prefers to keep to herself. 

Even so in our bodily house there are rooms 
where work is carried on which our physiologists 
have not yet come to understand. It is a little 
strange, when the body has been studied for so 
many hundred years, that there should remain 
any part of it not fully understood. Do you 
open your eyes a little when I say so many hun¬ 
dred years, thinking I must be mistaken ? If I 
[i°8] 


THE HOUSEKEEPER'S CLOSETS. 


109 


am, then some wiser people than I are also mis¬ 
taken, for Landois and Stirling in their physi¬ 
ology tell us that Aristotle said three hundred 
and eighty-four years before Christ, that the 
heart propels the blood to all parts of the body, 
but it would seem that he did not know that it 
came back to the heart, although he named the 
aorta and the venae cavae. 

About 300 B. c., two renowned doctors gave 
the arteries their names, thinking that they car¬ 
ried air because they were always empty after 
death ; but in 131 A. D. , Galen contradicted this 
idea because he found that blood always flowed 
from a wounded artery. Michael Servetus, 
whom Calvin had burned in 1553 A. d. , discov¬ 
ered the circulation of the blood in the lungs, 
and in 1604 William Harvey demonstrated the 
complete circulation of the blood. In Cicero a 
distinction is made between venous and arterial 
blood. In 1608 Borelli first estimated the 
amount of work done by the heart, and in 1661 
by means of the microscope Malpighi discovered 
the capillaries. 

This indicates but a small part of the investi¬ 
gation of the body during the period previous to 
the last date. Since then students of physiology 
have been innumerable ; the aids of science have 
vastly increased, and the functions of most organs 



110 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


of the body have been watched and accurately 
described. But there still remain a few rooms 
in the bodily house which are as mysterious as 
those to which Blue Beard gave Fatima the key. 
We are not afraid, however, that they contain 
ghastly visions of murdered victims. These puz¬ 
zling rooms are not locked against our entrance; 
the doors are open ; we may walk in and pry 
around as much as we please, but with all our 
prying we are as yet only able to guess what is 
done therein. But I am inclined to think that 
they may appropriately be called the housekeep¬ 
er’s closets. 

Two of these rooms are located at the back of 
the reception room, one on each side. They are 
called the tonsils, and ought not to be visible, 
but they are often so enlarged that they quite 
fill up the throat and may interfere with the 
breathing. Stohr says that great quantities of 
white corpuscles wander out of the tonsils, but 
he says nothing of their wandering into them, so 
we can infer that the tonsils may manufacture 
white blood cells. 

At the base of the brain are little cells called 
the pituitary body and the pineal gland, and that 
is all we can tell about them ; they exist and have 
names. Most of the glands of the body have 
ducts or passages leading out of them, but these 



THE HOUSEKEEPER'S CLOSETS. 


Ill 


rooms, which I call the housekeeper’s closets, 
are known as ductless glands because there is no 
duct or canal to carry away whatever may be 
manufactured in them. One of these, the thy¬ 
roid gland consists of two lobes, one on each side 
of the larynx connected by a cross-piece. We do 
not know what this gland does, but when it is taken 
out of an animal we know that it has tremors, that 
there is alteration of the motor powers, difficulty 
in breathing, degeneration of the connective tis¬ 
sue and mucous membrane, wasting away of all 
the tissues, especially the muscles, a diminution 
of the red corpuscles, a great increase of white 
corpuscles, and finally, imbecility and death ; so 
we can see that a very important work must be 
done in this little glandular closet, even though 
we do not understand it. 

The thymus gland is another ductless gland 
located partly in the thorax, and partly in the 
neck. It increases in size during the first two or 
three years of life, then remains stationary until 
the tenth or fourteenth year, when it begins to 
grow smaller, and finally disappears altogether. 
It is supposed that it has the functions of the true 
lymph gland. 

Over the top of each kidney is fitted a little 
cap called the supra-renal capsule. It belongs 
with the mysterious rooms, and is supposed to 



112 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


have something to do with regulating the amount 
of pigment or coloring matter produced in the 
blood. This is a guess based upon the fact that, 
when they are diseased, the skin becomes of a 
brown color. 

The largest and most important of these puz¬ 
zling rooms is called the spleen. It is located 
in the left side of the abdominal cavity above the 
hip. Its structure is much like that of the 
sponge. It is largely supplied with blood ves¬ 
sels, and what it does is guessed at from the 
effects of its removal, from the changes which 
the blood undergoes in passing through it, from 
its chemical composition, from the results of ex¬ 
periments upon it and from the effects of disease. 

When the spleen has been removed, the 
lymphatic glands enlarge and the blood-forming 
power of the red marrow of bones is increased. 
I think I did not tell you about that property of 
the red marrow of bones. There are two kinds 
of marrow in bones, the red and yellow ; the 
yellow consists chiefly of fat, and is found prin¬ 
cipally in the long bones of the limbs, while the 
cavities inside the bones of the head and trunk 
are filled with red marrow which has the power 
of making new red blood corpuscles, so that I 
think these cavities in the bones may properly be 
classed with the housekeeper’s closets. 



THE HOUSEKEEPER'S CLOSETS. 


113 


But to continue concerning the effects of re¬ 
moving the spleen. The number of red blood 
corpuscles is diminished, the white ones are in¬ 
creased in number, while the lymphatic glands, 
especially those of the neck, increase in size. 
This experiment would seem to indicate that the 
spleen makes white blood corpuscles and destroys 
red ones. After a meal, the spleen increases in 
size, and is usually largest about five hours after 
digestion has begun, and this probably has some 
relation to the manufacture of white corpuscles. 
There is a relation between the spleen and the 
liver, for it is found that when the spleen con¬ 
tracts, the liver enlarges. It is observed also 
that depressing emotions, such as grief or sorrow, 
increase the size of the spleen, while the exhila¬ 
rating emotions diminish it, so there may pos¬ 
sibly be a real connection between the irritable 
mental condition of a person, which we some¬ 
times speak of as splenetic, and the state of the 
spleen. 


8 



CHAPTER XX. 


THE ELECTRICAL APPARATUS. 

T HE brain, as we have learned, is a busy work¬ 
shop, and here is located the telegraph office 
through which Man sends messages to all parts 
of the house. The brain cells are the electric 
batteries, and the nerves are the telegraph wires. 
You will remember that the spinal column is 
made of twenty-six bones with a hole in the cen¬ 
ter of each, and these placed one over the other 
make a long tube, and in this tube runs a cord 
made of white and gray matter like the brain, 
only the position is reversed, the gray being on 
the inside and the white outside. A college 
student once defined the spinal cord as the ‘ ‘ cord 
the vertebrae are strung on,” which was not such a 
very bad definition after all. It is calculated 
that there are as many as nine hundred million 
of the little cells in the brain, which generate the 
nervous current that corresponds to the electricity 
of the telegraph ; and in the spine are other cells 
which we may call branch batteries. 

[”4] 


THE ELECTRICAL APPARATUS. 


115 


From the brain twelve pairs of nerve-cables 
start out to carry messages to the eye, the ear, 
the nose and other parts in the region of the 
head. From the spinal cord thirty-one pairs go 
to all parts of the body. These nerves form 
what is called the cerebro-spinal nervous system, 
because it originates both in the brain and spinal 
cord. 

In the chapter on the general office, we studied 
the structure of nerves ; now we will learn what 
they do. Nerve fibers of the cerebro-spinal sys¬ 
tem are of two kinds,—those of motion and those 
of sensation. The same nerve force is sent over 
each, and yet one never does the work of the 
other. A knot of nerve cells collected together 
is called a ganglion; the brain is a collection of 
these ganglia, and in them is generated the nerve 
force. There are also gangalia in the spine 
which transmit, and in some way modify the 
messages sent from the brain. 

When we study the brain, we find that its 
various parts have each a special work to do. 
Certain parts have nothing to do with motion, 
but are centers for sensation or for special 
senses, as sight and hearing. Other parts of 
the brain have to do with motion only, and 
these are found in what is called the motor area 
of the brain. The motor area has lately been 



116 


OUR BODILY DWELLING . 


carefully studied, and we have learned to know 
through just what part of the brain messages 
are sent to move the various parts of the body. 
Thus we have learned that one part of the brain 
governs the movements of the arms, another of 



the legs, another the muscular movements of the 
face ; and we know, too, that the fibers of the 
nerves cross from one side of the brain to the op¬ 
posite side of the spinal cord, so that- the right 
brain governs the movements of the left side of 
the body and vice versa ; an injury to one side 
of the brain will affect the opposite side of the 
body. This is very important in surgery, and to 
show you what skill physicians have gained in 










THE ELECTRICAL APPARATUS. 


117 


locating the cause of a difficulty, I will quote 
from a case reported in the records of the Phila¬ 
delphia Orthopedic Hospital: — 

A young girl had fits of epilepsy ; she said in 
the beginning of each attack that she suffered in 
the right thumb. As the difficulty was of nerv¬ 
ous origin, the doctors thought they would see 
if taking out that part of the brain which gov¬ 
erned the motions of the thumb would cure the 
disease. As she was a mill girl, and it was very 
important that the use of her hand should be 
preserved as far as possible, they were anxious 
to remove only so much of the brain as governed 
the movements of the thumb. 

They opened the skull just over the part where 
they knew the nerve-center that governs the 
thumb is located, and cut out a piece of the 
brain about half an inch in diameter. By the 
use of an electric battery they decided that they 
had removed all of the brain that influenced the 
thumb, and judged that they had taken out all 
that was diseased. She recovered promptly, 
and with perfect control of all the muscles of the 
shoulder, elbow, wrist, and hand, but not of 
those of the thumb. Every one of those were 
paralyzed. 

Now remember, that only one half inch of the 
brain was removed, yet the muscles of the thumb 



118 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


cover a good deal of space. One lies in the ball 
of the thumb ; one between thumb and fore fin¬ 
ger ; one in front of the fore arm reaching almost 
to the elbow, and three on the back of the fore 
arm extending half way from wrist to elbow ; but 
the most wonderful thing in regard to this opera¬ 
tion I have yet to tell you. It was performed in 
October, 1891 ; by June, 1892, she had regained 
the entire use of her thumb. I wonder if new 
brain was formed, or if the motor nerve-center 
of the thumb on the other side, finding that his 
partner was gone, gradually took up his work also. 

Surgeons have also learned to locate the center 
of speech, written or spoken. Dr. Mac Ewen 
relates the case of a Scotch Presbyterian, who, 
after an injury to his head, suffered from ‘ ‘ mind- 
blindness.” That is to say, his eyes were not 
injured, but he could not understand what he 
saw. He could see his well-worn New Testa¬ 
ment before him, but comprehended nothing of 
what it meant, nor could he read the well-known 
words. The doctor removed a small piece of 
bone from the skull, and found a small tumor 
pressing on that part of the brain which governs 
the center of written speech. Upon remov¬ 
ing the tumor the man was entirely cured. 

We are told by these scientific investiga¬ 
tors that the area of spoken words is on the left 




TllE ELECTRICAL apparatus. 


119 


side of the head unless the individual is left- 
handed, when this area is on the right side. All 
right-handed people, therefore, talk with the left 
side of the brain. 

The cerebrum is the center of motion, speech, 
thought, and feeling. The small brain, or cere¬ 
bellum, regulates movements. 

When an order is sent from the brain to the 
arms or limbs to move, it must go through 
a motor cell of the spinal cord, and from there 
be re-transmitted. It seems as if the orders 
from the general office must be repeated at these 
little way stations to insure their being delivered at 
the right point; and messages of sensation which 
are sent from the surface of the body to the brain 
must also pass through the repeating stations in 
the spinal cord. 

We know that we can feel even when we do 
not see, so we can easily remember that the 
nerves of sensation pass out from the back of 
the spinal cord ; but if we want to act, we need 
to see, so we remember that the nerves of motion 
come from the front of the cord. 

When we see how quickly a motion is made, 
after we have willed to make it, we can but won¬ 
der how fast the nervous current travels. If your 
hand were on a hot stove, a message would be 
sent to the brain that the hand was being burned, 



120 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


then a message would be sent back to the hand 
to take itself away from the stove, but it would 
all be done so quickly you could scarcely believe 
that two messages had passed over the nerves be¬ 
fore you moved. 

I find the calculation in regard to the rapidity 
of travel of nerve force is, that it moves about 
one hundred and ten feet per second, so that a 
message from the toes to the brain would require 
one twentieth of a second, and the return mes¬ 
sage the same length of time ; so if the foot were 
hurt, it could not report the injury to the general 
office and receive a message in response until at 
least one tenth of a second had passed. 

Perhaps you have sometimes thought you 
would like to be a telegraph operator, and here 
you have been one all your life but did n’t know 
it. More than that, you not only operate but 
you own the whole line. Some of the messages 
you send or receive, you forget at once, and 
some you file and put away in another part of 
the brain, which we will learn about as the 
library. 

I watched the head clerk in the office of an 
hotel the other day; he received the travelers 
who came, had them register their names, as¬ 
signed them rooms, and sent their baggage up 
after them. He ordered the call boys to answer 



THE ELECTRICAL APPARATUS. 


121 


the bells, he heard complaints, made out the 
bills, took in the money, and received telegrams. 
He quieted an angry man, and stirred up a lazy 
boy. He was thinking of everything ; controll¬ 
ing and managing everything; and I said, 

‘ ‘ How much this is like Man in his great cen¬ 
tral brain-office. He sends and receives mes¬ 
sages ; he registers guests; he thinks, plans, 
orders, executes; and, what is strangest of 
all, he perhaps does not know that he is doing 
anything at all remarkable.” 



CHAPTER XXI. 


THE WONDERFUL CLOCK. 

I N the great World’s Fair at Vienna, Austria, 
in 1873, I saw a clock that would run ten 
years without winding. It marked the seconds, 
minutes, and hours ; the day, week, and month ; 
the year, and changes of the moon, and I can¬ 
not tell you how many other things besides. I 
thought that this was the most wonderful clock 
I had ever heard of, but yesterday I heard of a 
clock that runs by electricity and regulates and 
winds itself; and now that I come to think of it, 
I see that this is only patterning after the mar¬ 
velous clock of our wonderful house. This is 
wound up at the beginning of life, and runs on 
till life’s close, kept in motion and regulated by 
the electric nerve force. 

Its measure of time is not the same as we have 
in our watches, and each individual house has 
its own time. The generality of mankind keep 
nearly the same bodily time, and that has created 
what we may call a standard time, but each in¬ 
dividual may vary from the standard and yet be 
[122] 



THE WONDERFUL CLOCK . 


123 


all right. This wonderful clock we call the sym¬ 
pathetic nervous system. We have seen that 
the cerebro-spinal nervous system governs volun¬ 
tary muscles. The sympathetic nerves govern 
involuntary muscles, and these are located inside 
the body. This nervous system is made up of 
ganglia, about fifty in number, located in the 
cavity of the body each side of the spinal column. 
They are united by nerve fibers passing from one 
to the other, and some fibers also pass to the spi¬ 
nal nerves, so that the two systems are in a way 
connected. The fibers from these ganglia form 
net-works in various parts of the cavities of the 
body, and each net-work is called a plexus , and 
the great plexus, which lies in the abdominal 
cavity, is sometimes spoken of as the abdominal 
brain. The cranial brain is the seat of con¬ 
sciousness and of thought. The abdominal brain 
presides over the functions of the organs of the 
body. It takes charge of secretion ; it controls 
and manages nourishment; it receives sensations 
and transmits motions without consulting the 
head clerk in the central office ; it controls the 
size and tone of the blood vessels ; it sends or¬ 
ders to the liver, causing it to manufacture bile 
and glycogen, and excrete urea. It may send 
such violent orders to the intestines that, in their 
haste to obey, they contract with so much force 



124 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


as to cause pain or a very rapid action of the 
bowels. If this abdominal brain gets excited, it 
may order the sweat glands to pour out such a 
quantity of water that the person is bathed in 
perspiration. This brain we call the solar plexus. 

The different ganglia of the sympathetic nerv¬ 
ous system may each be called a little brain. 
These ganglia are found everywhere in the vis¬ 
cera, and are known as automatic motor centers. 
Those located in the heart cause it to beat, 

“ Keeping, time, time, time, 

In a sort of Runic rhyme,” 

not in unison with the passing seconds but a 
little faster, about seventy-two times in a minute. 

In the intestines, the automatic motor ganglia 
keep up a rhythmic motion which we call peri¬ 
stalsis, moving the contents along through the 
alimentary canal. The reservoir of the bladder 
has also its contraction and dilatation ; the lungs 
have their rhythm, filling and emptying eighteen 
or twenty times a minute. Dr. Byron Robinson 
says the liver has also a rhythm, enlarging with 
influx of blood during digestion, and returning to 
normal size during rest. He finds that the spleen 
works according to rhythmic time in the same 
way as the liver, and so do the pancreas and 
kidneys. When this rhythm of the vital organs 



THE WONDERFUL CLOCK. 


125 


is disturbed, we have disease. Is not this a 
wonderful clock that marks off the functions of 
the body in regular beats, some fast, some slow, 
some oftener than once a second, some not 
oftener than once a month ? And as this is not 
under the control of our will, we must think that 
the divine Architect himself made it, wound it 
up, set it in motion, and governs it by his own 
power. 

O wonderful clock of our earthly life, 

That beats from our birth to death, 

That marks the pulsing of our hearts, 

The flowing of our breath ; 

God holds thy key in his own right hand, 

And watches thy pendulum swing ; 

He turns thy hands as thy pulses beat, 

Himself holds the strong mainspring. 

And our life shall beat at his royal word, 

And shall end as his will shall be; 

But the life of the soul shall pulse on and on, 
Throughout eternity. 



CHAPTER XXII. 


REGULATOR AND MAINSPRING. 

I F you open your watch so that you can look at 
the works, you will see a little pointer that 
moves along the scale of an arc, at one end of 
which is the letter F, which stands for fast ; at 
the other end the letter S, for slow. By moving 
this pointer toward the one or the other, the 
watch is made to run faster if it is losing time, 
or slower if it gains. 

Our wonderful clock has a regulator located in 
the back part of the general office. It is called 
the cerebellum, or little brain. Like the cere¬ 
brum, or great brain, it is composed of white and 
gray matter, and the two divisions of the brain 
are connected by the pons Varolii. We can 
move the regulators of our watches back and 
forth and yet really have no idea how any change 
is effected ; and I am compelled to tell you that 
we are as yet somewhat ignorant of what the 
cerebellum does, but it is generally admitted that 
it controls, regulates,— co-ordinates, physiolo¬ 
gists say,— the movements of voluntary muscles. 
Experiments prove that it is not an organ of 
[126] 


REGULATOR AND MAINSPRING. 


127 


thought, feeling, or motion, like the great brain ; 
but its importance is indicated by the fact that 
its convolutions are deeper, so that there is a 
greater proportion of gray matter, and that, we 
learned, is the important nerve substance. 

When we cannot find out just what the healthy 
organ does, we study what effect is produced by 
disease or injury of the organ. If the cerebellum 
is entirely removed from a pigeon, the animal 
dies. If only the superficial layer is removed, 
the bird becomes weak and its movements are 
not uniform. If a still greater part is taken 
away, the movements become more irregular and 
violent, the bird cannot fly or spring or walk 
perfectly. Its will is not affected, but it seems 
not to have the power of doing what it wants to 
do. When the deeper layers of the cerebellum 
are removed, it cannot fly or turn or walk at all ; 
if placed on its back, it cannot get upon its legs. 
It will try very hard to do the things it has been 
accustomed to do, but all to no purpose. The 
limbs move, but anyhow and everyhow. It can 
see and hear, it has intelligence, it trys to avoid 
obstacles ; but all its efforts are ineffectual, appar¬ 
ently because it cannot regulate its movements 
and make its muscles work together. 

When we remember how many muscles may 
be used in making single, simple movements, 



128 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


we can understand there must be some power 
that will regulate the nerve force sent to those 
muscles, so that they will work in harmony 
without our thinking about it. For instance, 
it takes six particular movements and calls 
into play a dozen or more muscles, to take 
one step in walking. It would be impossi¬ 
ble for us to manage all that machinery by 
the will, to send the various messages to just 
the right point to flex the leg, move it forward, 
straighten the knee, lift the heel, rest on the toe, 
bring the other leg forward, and repeat these at 
every step. We learn to do this very slowly, 
carefully, and imperfectly at first. See the baby 
learning to walk. He does not succeed in mak¬ 
ing all the muscles work harmoniously together, 
but after a time the muscles get trained, the 
cerebellum takes control of the nerve force, and 
walking becomes automatic,—that is, we will to 
walk, and then the muscles do it themselves. 
But, as we have seen by the experiments made 
on the pigeon, the muscles could not do it, no 
matter how much we willed it, if the cerebellum 
did not take charge of matters and act as a regu¬ 
lator. 

And now we will talk of the mainspring, 
which is the name I give to the medulla oblon¬ 
gata; those two words mean the oblong marrow. 



REGULATOR AND MAINSPRING . 


129 


We know how very important the mainspring of 
a watch is, or at least we find out when it is 
broken. Then the watch stops, and will not go 
until a new mainspring is put in. Unfortunately 
for us, when our mainspring is broken, our won¬ 
derful clock stops forever ; we can never get a 
new spring. For that reason, the center of the 
medulla oblongata is called the vital knot, for in¬ 
jury to that stops all the machinery, and Man sud¬ 
denly moves out of his bodily dwelling to live in 
it no more. The medulla oblongata is composed 
of white and gray matter, and is rather pyram¬ 
idal in shape, the base being upward. It really 
may be called an enlargement of the spinal cord. 
It is about an inch and a quarter long, three 
fourths of an inch wide, and half an inch thick ; 
so you see that it does not require a very big 
space to contain the vital knot. You will be 
able to judge of its location by remembering that 
it unites the brain and spinal cord. In the 
medulla, a part of the nerve fibers of one side 
of the brain cross over to govern the other side 
of the body ; some of them cross in the cord 
itself, and some in the pons Varolii. 

The books say that the medulla is the center of 
reflex influences, and I think we have said noth¬ 
ing about these. When I told you how long it 
takes for a message to go from an injured foot to 


9 



130 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


the brain and the return message to be sent, you 
perhaps thought it certainly could not take so 
long, for, if your hand or foot were hurt, you 
jerked it away before you thought. That was 
true, but it was not because the message traveled 
faster than I said, but because there are in the 
spinal cord and in the medulla some nerve cen¬ 
ters that do not wait for commands from the 
brain before they send messages over the motor 
nerves to the muscles. The messages from the 
injured part reach some of these nerve centers, 
perhaps in the spinal cord, and they send the 
messages to take the hand or foot away, and 
it is really done before the brain has received 
\yord that any harm is threatened. 

The movements resulting from these reflex in¬ 
fluences we call involuntary movements, and cer¬ 
tain of them originate in the nerve centers of the 
medulla. Sudden winking to protect the eye 
from injury is controlled by the medulla, and is 
a reflex act. Sneezing is also a reflex act; we 
cannot produce a real sneeze at will, but if some¬ 
thing irritates the mucous membrane of the nose, 
a message to that effect is sent to the brain, and 
on its way passes through the medulla. The 
reflex nerve centers there located send back 
word to the muscles of expiration to put the of¬ 
fender out, even though we should be in church 



REGULATOR AND MAINSPRING . 


131 


or in some very solemn place. Coughing, swal¬ 
lowing, and vomiting are all reflex acts governed 
by the nerves of the medulla. 

The cerebro-spinal and the sympathetic nerv¬ 
ous systems are closely united, so, by the action of 
the cerebro-spinal nerves, we can, by our wills, 
govern some things to a certain point. Then the 
sympathetic system takes control, and our will is 
set aside. This is the case with breathing. The 
lungs are mechanically self-adjusting through the 
nerve centers of the medulla, and breathing is 
really a reflex act. Taking in the breath stimu¬ 
lates the fibers which act reflexly on the nerve 
centers governing the breathing out; and lessen¬ 
ing the size of the lungs in breathing out acts 
reflexly on the nerves which govern the breathing- 
in muscles, and so the lungs keep continually at 
work. 

In the medulla also reside the nerves which 
govern the rhythmical action of the heart. Is it 
not marvelous that so small an organ as the me¬ 
dulla oblongata can have such a wonderful con¬ 
trolling power over the various organs of the 
body, keeping them moving in time and tune so 
that there will be no discord in the song of life ? 



CHAPTER XXIII. 


SPECIAL WATCHMEN. 

W HEN a man owns an elegant mansion, he is 
often not satisfied with the guard kept over 
it by the regular police, but employs special 
watchmen. Our bodily house has five such 
watchmen called special senses, and named 
Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, and Touch. We 
have already studied these under other titles ; we 
must now learn how they are special guards pro¬ 
tecting us from danger. 

Sight dwells in the eye, and we can readily see 
how he is a protection. If you have ever seen a 
blind man walking alone through the streets of a 
city, you have been impressed by the dangers 
with which he is surrounded ; the people, the 
gutters, the street crossings, the teams, the open 
cellar doors, and the lamp-posts, are all possible 
causes of injury which he can avoid only by 
carefully feeling his way with his cane ; but you, 
with your quick, keen eyes, can run through the 
crowded thoroughfares, avoiding the open doors, 
dodging the teams, jumping over the gutters, and 
[H2] 


SPECIAL WATCHMEN . 


133 


go four blocks while he is warily picking his 
way across one. 

Hearing is also a great protection against dan¬ 
gers which come from directions where man can¬ 
not see. If danger is approaching from the rear, 
he may be warned by his ears. It is not quite as 
unsafe for the deaf man to go about alone as it is 
for the blind man, and yet he is in great danger. 
He does not hear the runaway horses that are 
dashing upon him, or the whistle of the tram, or 
the bell of the electric street-car, and so may be 
killed even though he has the sense of sight. 
People sometimes ask each other whether they 
would rather be blind or deaf. Each condition 
has its inconveniences and perils, and each its 
compensations, The blind man cannot see his 
friends, cannot read the ordinary printed page, 
cannot enjoy the sunset or the landscape ; but 
he can hear the voices of people and the songs 
of birds, can listen to the lecture or the concert, 
even though it be in darkness, and with his 
fingers, by the aid of his friend Touch, can learn 
to read the raised printing made especially for 
the blind. The deaf man can see all the beau¬ 
ties of nature and art, can walk unattended, can 
read books and papers, but cannot hear. Did 
you ever think what it would be to live in a world 
without sound; to see life in all its activities 



134 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


pass like a panorama before you ; to see people 
laugh, and not know what they are laughing at, 
to see people talk and not know what they are 
talking about ? It must be a great trial, and I 
wonder at the patience of deaf people, and feel 
that we have not half the sympathy with them 
that we should have. 

We learned of Taste as the guard in a pink 
uniform, who lives in the reception room. His 
position is one of great responsibility, but he is 
not always to be entirely relied upon. He can 
be taught to be very fond of hurtful things and 
to admit into the house guests that are deter¬ 
mined to do great injury. The tongue, the resi¬ 
dence of Taste, has one nerve of motion, and two 
of sensation. On the tongue are little points 
called papilloe, in which Taste especially dwells. 
Objects to be tasted must be dissolved either in 
water or in the fluids of the mouth. 

It is rather queer that some things taste dif¬ 
ferent on the tip of the tongue from what they 
do on the back of the tongue ; for example, alum 
tastes sour on the tip and sweet on the back of 
the tongue ; sulphate of sodium tastes salty on 
the tip and bitter on the back. If Taste were 
left to his own uneducated sense, it is quite 
doubtful if he would ever admit to the house any 
very salty, fiery, or bitter visitors; but if often 



SPECIAL PVAI CUMEAt. 


135 


introduced to them, he after a time begins to 
tolerate them, and ends by liking them, and then 
his judgment as a guard is impaired. It should be 
our aim to allow him to become acquainted only 
with those who visit us with motives of helpful¬ 
ness, and of these we shall speak when we inter¬ 
view the guests of Man in his bodily house. 

Smell, another special watchman, resides in 
the porch of the nose in the lining which, as we 
learned, is called the Schneiderian membrane. 
He can be trained to great acuteness, or he can 
be very dull and unreliable. In the savage, the 
sense of smell becomes a great source of infor¬ 
mation, as it is in many animals. Humboldt 
says that certain South American Indians can 
smell a stranger in the dark, and tell whether he 
is white or black. It is very important that a 
cook should have the keen sense of smell in order 
to judge of the quality and conditions of food, 
and also to know whether things on the stove 
are burning, and make a report to the central 
office. 

The special nerve of smell is called the olfac¬ 
tory nerve. When irritating substances are 
taken into the nose, its nerves of sensation are 
aroused, and they send the offender out with a 
noise we call sneezing, so that these nerves of 
sensation are also special watchmen. The sense 




136 


OUR BODILY DWELLING . 


of smell is given us for enjoyment as well as pro¬ 
tection. It delights in the odor of flowers and 
perfumes, and the pleasure of eating is increased 
by the odor of food. 

One special purpose of smell is to warn us 
against bad air. Does our good fairy Aura ever 
get naughty ? Aura is quite like people ; she be¬ 
comes bad by keeping bad company. As long 
as she is associated with good company she 
brings only pure and enjoyable odors to the sense 
of smell; but when she mingles with disreputable 
members of the Gas family, she brings to the 
house some guests that make Smell feel inclined 
to shut the door in her face; and if he makes a 
loud enough complaint to the central office, Man 
hears and sets matters right by moving his quar¬ 
ters, or by sending Aura’s bad companions where 
they cannot come into the house. If Man pays 
no attention to the complaint, Smell gets tired of 
grumbling, and Aura may take with her into the 
laundry a good many guests that badly need 
washing themselves, and we have no arrange¬ 
ments for washing outside tramps ; the laundry 
is arranged only for the purpose of attending to 
the members of our own household, so it is quite 
important that we heed the first warning of 
SmeU when he reports that Aura is coming in 
with undesirable visitors. 



SPECIAL WATCHMEN. 


137 


The last of our special watchmen is Touch, and 
he resides in what are called the tactile corpus¬ 
cles of the nerves of sensation. How much our 
physiologists delight in big words ! But I do n’t 
begin to tell you half the long words they use for 
I do n’t want to frighten you away from the 
study of your wonderful house. 

You remember that the nerves of sensation 
carry messages from the outside of the body to 
the brain. By them we learn the form of 
substances, their hardness, smoothness, and tem¬ 
perature. If the nerves are unpleasantly im¬ 
pressed at any time, they report at once to Man, 
and so warn him of danger, and this warning we 
call pain ; thus we see that Pain, instead of 
being an enemy, is one of our best friends, and 
whenever we feel pain, we should remember that it 
is a kindly warning. Some people act as if Pain 
were a foe who must be silenced at any cost, so 
they do all they possibly can to make him keep 
still. The wiser plan is to learn, if possible, 
what it is that makes him cry out, and then re¬ 
move the cause. If it were not for Pain warn¬ 
ing us of danger, we might be so seriously injured 
before we knew what was being done that there 
would be no way to cure the injury. It seems 
hard that the dear little baby should be hurt 
when he falls, or is burned by the fire, or cut by 



138 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


the knife, but by these methods Pain is teaching 
him to be careful, and to guard himself against 
danger. 

Muscular Sense may be classed among the 
special watchmen. This is a term used to de¬ 
note the knowledge which the muscles have of 
their own state. For example, with your eyes 
shut you know whether the thumb is bent in or 
out, or in which direction the foot may be turned. 
That this does not come from knowing that you 
willed the thumb to be bent or the foot to be 
turned in a certain direction, may be proven by 
having some one else move your hand or foot, 
and see if you cannot tell in which direction it is 
moved. 

Muscular Sense also gives us knowledge of 
weights lifted and the amount of power to be 
employed in overcoming resistance. If we see 
an object we can calculate its weight, but if it be 
wrapped in something and so hidden from sight, 
we can judge of its weight as we lift it, and can 
guess whether it is one pound or ten. This is 
done by Muscular Sense. 

This sense also helps us to keep our balance 
in standing erect; and when it is impaired, the 
person finds it very difficult to stand or walk 
straight. The man who counts money in a bank 
has this sense greatly developed, for he detects 




SPECIAL WA PCIIMEN. 


139 

instantly the coin that is of light weight. Where 
this sense is defective in the arms, the person 
will drop what he is carrying unless he con¬ 
stantly thinks of it. Such a one would not make 
a very trustworthy nurse, and I would not want 
to be the baby she cared for, would you ? 

In cases of defective muscular sense, the eyes, 
in a measure, take its place, so that the person 
may be able to walk fairly well with his eyes 
open, but will stagger like a drunken man if they 
are shut. Like all of the senses, this sense can 
be cultivated, and by its education becomes of 
greater value and a surer guardian. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 


THE WINDOWS. 



E might expect that a building so important 


V V as our marvelous mansion would have 
many windows. In fact it has only two, but 
these are worthy of our admiration. Over them 
are hung beautiful awnings trimmed with a fringe 
corresponding in color to that of the house itself. 
The divine Architect makes nothing for ornament 
only, and so this fringe acts as a guard to sweep 
away intruders. The awnings are lined with a 
delicate pink membrane, called the conjunctiva , 
which is reflected downward over the windows 
themselves as a netting or screen. 

These awnings also serve to wash the windows. 
They are raised and lowered noiselessly by means 
of small muscles, at the will of the occupant. I 
said at the will of the occupant, but, in fact, they 
are being raised and lowered continually whether 
he thinks about it or not, and this is called wink¬ 
ing. Close up under the eyelid, is a little sac or 
gland which secretes a fluid, and the winking 
spreads this fluid over the surface of the eye. 
On the lower eyelid near the nose is the opening 


[140] 



THE WINDOWS. 


141 


of a little canal through which the iluid passes 
downward into the nose, so the winking is, in 
reality, a washing of the windows. Would not 
our housekeepers think it a fine thing if some 
genius would invent an awning that would wash 
windows after this fashion ? Sometimes the fluid 
accumulates so fast that it cannot be disposed of 
through the canal, but overflows upon the cheek ; 
this we call crying or shedding tears. Along the 
lower lid is a row of little oil glands, and the oily 
secretion keeps the lids from sticking together 
when they are shut ; and, as oil and water will 
not mix, it serves also to keep the tears from 
overflowing on the cheeks. When the awnings 
are raised, we can see the beautiful transparent 
windows through which Man looks out upon the 
world. And when at night he is tired of looking, 
and draws the awnings down over the windows, 
we say he is asleep. 

At each window hangs a circular curtain, colored 
in harmony with the tinting of the house, adding 
greatly to its beauty. In its center is a circular 
opening which looks to us like a round black spot 
in the center of the eye. There is a small mus¬ 
cle around this opening which has the power of 
contracting and making the hole small when the 
light is too strong, or relaxing and making the 
hole large if the light is too weak. 



142 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


The transparent window in front of the cur¬ 
tain, in shape like the crystal of a watch, is 
called the cornea. The curtain is called the iris, 
which means rainbow. 

Through these rainbow-tinted windows Man 
becomes acquainted with all the beauties of na¬ 
ture and art, and through these windows we come 
most near to catching a glimpse of Man himself. 
If we can read the language of the eye we shall 
know the thoughts. The lips may speak falsely 
but the eyes do not lie, and may contradict the 
spoken word. The lips may be silent, and the 
eye speak so eloquently of gratitude, affection, or 
confidence that words are needless. With the 
eyes closed light dies out of the face, so no won¬ 
der that the faces of the blind are lacking in ex¬ 
pression, while the face of a deaf-mute, who 
hears with his eyes, glows with the intensity 
of his own thoughts and with the reflection of 
the varying phases of life around him. 

We often hear of “the tell-tale eye,” and 
when we are in doubt of the truth of the state¬ 
ment, we say, “ Can you look me in the eye and 
say that ? ” I trust that we shall each keep a 
soul so pure and true that we shall always be 
able to look the whole world in the face with an 
open, honest glance from our soul-windows, 



CHAPTER XXV. 


THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CAMERA. 

S O many people now-a-days are interested in 
the study of photography that you will be 
pleased to hear that the eye is a photographic 
camera. A photograph is made by using a plate 
of glass covered with a film which is sensitive to 
light. This sensitive plate is placed in a box, 
with a small opening through which the light 
enters. The object to be photographed is placed 
in front of this box, or camera, as it is called, 
and the light reflected from the object, passing 
through the opening in the box, acts upon the 
sensitive plate and produces the image. The 
light parts of the object act strongly upon the 
plate ; the dark parts or shadows act feebly and 
thus a life-like image is obtained. 

You see if it were not for light and shade there 
could be no picture. I have read that Queen 
Elizabeth was very much offended with the art¬ 
ist who in painting her portrait made some parts 
of her face darker than others, saying that her 
face did not have such dark spots upon it, which 

[ H3 ] 


144 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


shows that, highly educated as she was, she did 
not understand the necessity of shadows in a 
picture. 

It is very interesting to notice how closely the 
eye in its structure resembles the photographer’s 
camera. In shape, the eyeball is nearly spherical. 
The interior is a soft, jelly-like, transparent sub¬ 
stance called the vitreous humor from the Latin 
word vitreous , glassy. This vitreous humor is, 
in shape, much like a rubber ball dented in on 
one side. The dented place is just back of the 
iris, and in the space between the two is fitted 
the crystalline lens. 

The vitreous humor is surrounded by a very 
delicate, transparent membrane which splits into 
two layers when it reaches the lens, enclosing 
its edges and holding it in place. Just outside 
of this comes a coat called the retina, from a 
Latin word meaning network, which covers two 
thirds of the eyeball and ends in scalloped edges, 
the orra serrata. This retina is the most impor¬ 
tant part of the eye, for it is really the organ of 
sight. Although it is extremely delicate, it is a very 
complicated structure, having no less than eight 
distinct layers of tubes, fibers, cells, and granu¬ 
lar matter, all of which, no doubt, are very im¬ 
portant, but which we do not fully understand. 
Outside of the retina is a covering called the 



THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CAMERA. 


145 


choroid coat, from a Greek word meaning leather, 
because it is dark brown or almost black in color. 
This covers all of the eyebalk except the part in 
front which is occupied with the transparent 
window, the cornea, of which I have told you. 



The Eye. 

d. The sclerotic. c. The cornea. 

e. The choroid. b. The retina. 

o. The optic nerve. a. The crystalline lens. 

k. The pupil. g : The ciliary processes. 

h. The vitreous humor. i. The iris. 

Outside of all is a strong membrane which is 
called the sclerotic , from a Greek word meaning 
hard, because it is the toughest coat of the eye. 
The sclerotic unites with the choroid coat around 
the edge of the cornea, 
io 



146 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


Do you think now you have a good idea of 
the eye ? Take your rubber ball and dent it in 
on one side. In front of this dent place your 
watch crystal. Imagine that your ball has two 
outer coverings that unite around the edge of 
the crystal, holding it in place. Inside of these 
two coverings is a delicate network of the ret¬ 
ina, and the ball itself represents the vitreous 
humor. The watch crystal represents the cor¬ 
nea. Back of this cornea stretch a colored cur¬ 
tain with a hole in the center, and just back 
of this hole, in the dented place of the ball, put 
a double convex lens, and you will have a very 
good representation of the eye. The eyeball 
thus completed is surrounded by a cushion of 
fat which fills the bony cavity of the socket of 
the eye so that it can turn easily without injury. 
To the eyeball are attached six muscles which 
enable it to be moved in all directions. One of 
them is of particular interest because it runs over 
a pulley. 

And now we will see how the eye and the 
camera compare with each other. The camera 
is a box with only one opening to admit light. 
We may say the same of the eye. The camera 
is painted a dull black inside; the eye has its 
dark choroid coat. In the opening in front of 
the camera is a brass tube fitted with a double 



THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CAMERA. 


147 


convex lens, and this tube is lengthened or short¬ 
ened by means of a screw. The eye has its con¬ 
vex lens which changes its shape instead of being 
moved forward and backward. No light can 
enter the camera except through the one opening, 
and it must pass through the lens to reach the 
sensitive plate ; no light can enter the eye ex¬ 
cept through the circular opening of the iris, and 
it must pass through the lens before it reaches 
the sensitive plate of the retina. 

In the camera, the lens is altered in its posi¬ 
tion so as to bring the rays of light to a point or 
focus, as it is called, just at the right place. In 
the eye this is accomplished by changing the 
shape of the lens. A lens is a glass shaped so as 
to bend or refract the rays of light so that, enter¬ 
ing the lens parallel, they will be changed in 
direction. A convex lens bends the rays so that 
they will all come together at one point, and the 
more convex the lens, the sooner will the rays of 
light come together. In the eye this bending of 
the rays is aided by the cornea and also by the 
aqueous and vitreous humors, as well as by the 
changing of the shape of the lens. The ciliary 
muscles which surround the lens contract and 
make it more convex, or relax and flatten it. 
The nearer the object, the more convex the lens 
becomes; the farther away the object, the more the 



148 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


lens flattens. This is called the power of accom¬ 
modation of the eye, and its purpose is to focus 
the rays of light directly on the retina. 

When we look at a photograph, if we see that 
the features are not clear and distinct, we say 
that the person was out of focus ; by that we 
mean that he was not placed so that the rays of 
light reflected from him would come to a point 



Showing how the Rays from an Object Focus on the Retina. 


just exactly on the sensitive plate, therefore the 
image is more or less blurred. 

In looking at an object, if you move it back¬ 
ward and forward, you will find a point where 
everything looks clear ; but if you move it much 
closer or farther away, everything becomes in¬ 
distinct. In normal vision the image of a dis¬ 
tinct object is formed directly on the retina 
without any effort of the eye. This distance, 




THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CAMERA. 


149 


about seventy yards or upwards, is called the 
remote point of vision. When the object comes 
nearer than this, the lens must begin to get more 
convex so as to bring the rays of light to a point 
sooner, and this convexity is increased until at 
last the object is so near that even with a strain¬ 
ing effort it can no longer be distinctly seen. 
The closest point at which an object can be dis¬ 
tinctly seen is, in the normal eye, about six 
inches. This is called the near point of vision. 
The eye can change or accommodate from a near 
to a distant object more rapidly than from a dis¬ 
tant to a near object, because this change is a 
flattening of the lens by a relaxation of the ciliary 
muscles, and they can relax more quickly than 
they can contract to make the lens more convex. 

If the eye is not normal, it may perhaps be 
too short from front to back, in which case the 
person is far-sighted. That is, the rays of light 
do not come together soon enough and so focus 
beyond the retina and the object will have to be 
moved farther away to be seen distinctly, or the 
defect can be remedied by wearing spectacles 
with a convex lens, which will help to focus the 
rays sooner. If the eye-ball is too long from 
front to back, the rays come to a focus too soon 
and the image will be formed in front of the ret¬ 
ina. In this case, the person moves the object 



150 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


closer so as to focus the rays on the retina. He 
is short-sighted, or near-sighted, and his glasses 
need to be concave so as to slightly disperse the 
rays and keep them from coming to a focus too 
soon. 

But all the light in the world would not pro¬ 
duce sight if there were not some arrangement 
for sending messages to the brain. Light strikes 
on the nerves of the retina, they communicate 
sensation to the optic nerve, and it carries them 
on to the brain, and man becomes aware of what 
is passing before his eyes. This optic nerve has 
not the power of receiving impressions of light, 
it can only tell what the retina reports. Where 
the optic nerve enters the eye, there is no sight, 
and this is called the blind spot. This nerye 
enters the eye a little to one side, so this blind 
spot does not interfere with our vision. If you 
are doubtful about having a blind spot in your 
eye you can prove it for yourself. Hold your 
two thumbs side by side before your eyes, about 
the distance you would hold a book in reading. 
Shut your left eye and fix your right eye on the 
nail of your left thumb. You are not making an 
effort now to see the right thumb but you still 
can see it. Now move the right thumb slowly 
away to one side and you will find there will be 
a spot where you cannot see the right thumb at 



THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CAMERA. 


151 


all, although you can see the shut hand ; but a 
little further on you will see the thumb again 
though all this time you have been looking stead¬ 
ily at the left thumb. 

The most sensitive part of the retina is directly 
in the center of the back of the eye. Here is a 
yellow spot where there are no fibers of the op¬ 
tic nerve, and the cones of the retina are very 
numerous. In looking at large objects we move 
the eyes so the different parts of the object are 
one after another brought into line with this 
yellow spot, then the brain takes all the separate 
impressions and puts them together in one image 
and judges of them as a whole, but we do this so 
quickly and so constantly that we do not realize 
that we are doing it. This rapid motion of the 
eyes in seeing, and our ability to notice only the 
vivid impressions, are the reasons why we are 
unconscious of our blind spot. I think it would 
be a good thing if we could turn our blind spot 
toward the unpleasant things of life and not see 
them at all. 

The stimulation of light upon the retina may 
last one eighth of a second after the object which 
reflected the light is removed, and it remains 
visible for that length of time to the eye, although 
in reality not present, so two impressions may 
follow each other so quickly as to seem to be 



152 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


continuous. A wheel may revolve so rapidly 
that the spokes seem to blend and become a 
solid, or a string with something bright at the 
end may be whirled so fast that we seem to see 
a bright circle. I saw not long ago a little Peep 
Show called a Zoetrope, which was made very 
interesting by understanding this fact. Looking 
through the peep-holes I saw a man apparently 
running and jumping into a barrel and out again, 
in and out, in and out, as if he really were alive. 
A horse jumped over a hurdle, a man ran up a 
ladder and into the open mouth of a giant that 
closed upon him. When the revolving wheel 
stood still I saw that on a band of paper were 
pictures representing these men and animals in 
the various positions of running and jumping, and 
when the wheel was set in rapid motion the effect 
of real life was produced. 

We have learned that there are many things 
going on in the eye of which we are unconscious. 
We do not realize that in vision we receive a 
multitude of impressions which the brain puts 
together in a complete whole. We are not 
conscious of changing the shape of the lens to 
bring the rays to a focus on the retina. We do 
not think anything about having a blind spot, 
and we are not practically aware of the fact that 



THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CAMERA. 


153 


we see everything upside down. The accompany¬ 
ing figure will perhaps explain why : — 



You see the rays at A are bent by the lens and 
focus at a, and those from B at b and rays from 
every other point along the line from A to B are 
focused at corresponding points between a and 
b } so that we have a distinct image at the line a 
and b of the object A and B, but much smaller 
and inverted. You can hardly believe that you 
see everything upside down in this way, but that 
is what the scientists tell us, and they have 
proved it by their experiments ; so I suppose we 
will have to believe them, while at the same time 
we are quite sure that we see things right side 
up. 

It is quite impossible for us to realize how 
much of our perception of objects by sight is the 
result of education. I have just read of an indi¬ 
vidual born with a film over the eyes which was 




154 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


removed after he had grown to maturity. When 
he first looked at things, he thought they touched 
his eyes, and when he put his hand to his eye, 
was surprised at not finding the object there and 
that he had to walk, often some distance, before 



he could touch it. He was obliged to train his 
eyes by means of his other senses. 

We learn to judge of the size of objects by 
sight, but this is not altogether reliable ; as for 
example, a space that is filled with objects seems 
to be larger than the same space if blank. A 
space with horizontal lines will seem shorter than 





THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CAMERA. 


155 


the same space marked with vertical lines. This 
fact is a good guide in the matter of dress. A 
person looks shorter in horizontally striped goods 
and taller when it is striped vertically. 

We are able to judge of the solidity of objects 
because we look at them with two eyes. The 
image formed in each eye is not exactly the same ; 
we can see just a little further around on one 
side of the object with one eye than with the 
other, and when the brain puts these two images 
together, we get the idea of perspective. If you 
will look at an object first with one eye shut, and 
then with the other, you will see just how dif¬ 
ferent the view' taken by each eye. You have 
seen a stereoscope ? Well, it is made on the 
same principle as the eye. There are two pic¬ 
tures taken from a slightly different point of 
view and looked at through two lenses separated 
by a partition so that the pictures blend into one. 
So the eyes are lenses separated by the partition 
of the nose, and the two views which they see 
of an object are blended and give us the idea of 
form and solidity. 

Why do not all objects seem of the same 
color ? Ah, now you have asked an interesting 
question, and, although I may not be able to 
answer it fully, I hope you will continue to study 
the subject until you have learned all about it. 



156 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


Sunlight seems white, but is made by the 
union of seven colors. The three primary colors 
are red, blue, and yellow, and these uniting make 
the seven, as we see them in the rainbow. Green 
is made of blue and yellow, orange of red and 
yellow ; red and blue make violet, and violet and 
blue make indigo. Isaac Newton arranged these 
colors in the order of the rainbow on a disk, and 
rotating it with great rapidity saw that they 
blended and the disk looked of a dull white. If 
an object lets all the rays of light pass through 
it, it will have no color, and is called translucent. 
If it allows none of the rays to pass through it, 
but reflects or sends them all back to the eye, 
the object looks white. If it absorbs all and re¬ 
flects none, it appears black. If it reflects only 
red rays, absorbing all the others, it looks red, 
and so with all the other primary colors. If it 
reflects some blue and some yellow rays, it looks 
green, and so on. 

How does the retina then tell us the story as 
to the reflection of light by the object, for the 
retina must be sensitive to all rays ? It is sup¬ 
posed that certain nerve fibers are excited by 
certain colors ; or to speak accurately, there are 
three sets of fibers affected by the three primary 
colors, and the way in which these fibers are 
affected will produce the various tints. If all 



THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CAMERA. 


157 


are aroused, they produce a sensation of white ; 
red will affect those fibers sensitive to red rays ; 
green will arouse those sensitive to blue and yel¬ 
low, and in this way the various combinations of 
color are made known to us. This theory would 
account for color-blindness on the supposition 
that the fibers which should be sensitive to some 
certain color do not respond to that color. 

Color adds much to the beauty of the world. 
JustTthink how gloomy it would be if everything 
were of a dull gray or brown ! Even the most 
beautiful color impartially given to every object 
would become monotonous. Those who are 
color-blind lose much of the pleasure of sight, 
but the matter becomes of more serious import 
when we realize how the safety and life of people 
depend upon the power of the engineer or pilot 
to recognize the color of danger signals. 

Color-blindness is much more common among 
men than women. One eminent oculist asserts 
that among twelve thousand children, he found ten 
girls and four hundred and eighty boys who were 
color-blind, and among a large audience of men 
and women, ten per cent of the men were color¬ 
blind, but not one woman. Some physicians are 
inclined to attribute this prevalence of color¬ 
blindness among boys and men to the use of 
tobacco. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 


THE MUSIC ROOM, 


N either side of the cupola are two very pretty 



porticoes which protect the entrance to a 
wonderful music room where music is never made, 
but where it is heard. Our good fairy Aura is a 
fine musician, but while she sings in one room 
her music is not heard there but in another, and 
Aura runs from one room to the other carrying 
the tones through these porticoes of the external 
ear to the place where they can be heard. 

The porticoes are convoluted and fluted in va¬ 
rious ways that add to their beauty. But these 
curvings are not wholly for looks, for we are told 
that they all help Aura to find her way into the 
circular passages that lead inward. These pas¬ 
sages are protected by hairy guards who, how¬ 
ever, never interfere with Aura. She goes with 
step brisk or slow through the porticoes, along 
the passages, until she comes to a curtain 
stretched tightly across the way. There is no 
opening in it, and it will not move, so what can 
she do ? Ah, Aura is a fairy, and she can be in 


[‘ 58 ] 


THE MUSIC ROOM. 


159 


more than one place at a time. She is also on 
the other side of this curtain, which is called the 
tympanum. How did she get through, if there is 
no door in this immovable curtain ? Perhaps 
you will remember that there are seven passages 
leading from the throat, and two of these lead 



The External, Middle, and Internal Ear, Showing the 
Small Bones, and the Cochlea. 


into the ears; they are called the Eustachian 
tubes. Through these Aura finds her way into 
the cavity that is known as the drum of the ear. 
If you shut your mouth tightly, and hold your 
nose, and then try to breathe out, you can feel 
her rush through these tubes into the middle 


ear. 



160 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


You all know how a drum is made, but do you 
know that a drum must have air on the inside 
or it will not sound ? The membrane of the 
tympanum is the head of the drum. But a drum 
will make no music unless some one pounds on 
it. Well, Aura knows that, and so she pounds 
with little blows that are called waves of air, and 
the tympanum vibrates, and this is the beginning 
of hearing, but it is only the beginning. 

The cavity into which the Eustachian tubes 
lead is called the middle ear, and here Aura has 
some funny playthings. One is a little hammer ; 
another, an anvil ; the third, a stirrup. They are 
all made of bone, and with them Aura makes 
Man hear the sound she brings. The little ham¬ 
mer is suspended by tiny muscles so that one end 
touches the tympanum, the other end touches 
the anvil, and the anvil is connected to the stir¬ 
rup, and the stirrup is fitted into an oval win¬ 
dow which is also closed by a tight membranous 
curtain. The room on the other side of this 
window is very small and is called the vestibule. 
Out of this open three passages called semi-cir¬ 
cular canals ; they are tubes and are like loops ; 
one goes backward, one forward, and one is hori¬ 
zontal. If you go out of the vestibule through 
one of these canals, you come into the vestibule 
again, and that would make six openings if it 



THE MUSIC ROOM. 


161 


were not that two of them unite at one point 
and enter the vestibule by a common way, 
From the fore-part of the vestibule passes 
another tube which coils two and a half times 
around like a snail shell, and so is called the 
cochlea. All of these tubes, forming what is 
called the labyrinth, are of bone, are lined by 
membranes, and filled with a fluid. In the ves¬ 
tibule are a number of six-sided crystals of car¬ 
bonate of lime called otoliths , or bonestones, 
which vibrate in the fluid and strike against 
the hair-like projections growing from the walls 
and seemingly connected with the nerve fibers. 
If we cut into the cochlea, we will see a central, 
bony pillar around which the tube winds two and 
a half times, and is divided into three compart¬ 
ments , one called the staircase of the vestibule ; 
one, the staircase of the tympanum; and one, 
the middle staircase. 

At the top of the staircase of the vestibule we 
pass through a small opening, and go down the 
staircase of the tympanum to a round window. 
Do you understand that the floor of one staircase 
is the roof of the staircase below it, so the middle 
one is roofed by the floor of the one above, and 
floored by the roof of the one below ? This 
middle staircase is filled with a fluid, and in here 
is the organ of Corti, a very complicated structure 



162 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


made of two parts resting on each other and 
forming an arch. It is estimated that there are 
not less than 3000 of these arches from which 
stiff hairs project. 

After passing the little oval window, we are in 
what is called the internal ear. When Aura 
enters the passage of the external ear, she goes 
on until she reaches the tympanum. Then she 
strikes it with many blows that make it shake. 
This motion is conducted through the hammer to 
the anvil, and on to the stirrup, which, pressing 
against the curtain in the oval window, makes 
that vibrate, and that shakes the fluid in the ves¬ 
tibule, and this motion vibrates the membranes 
and fluids of the cochlea, and the vibration of the 
fluids in the middle staircase sets all these little 
hairs of the organ of Corti in motion, and they 
touch the nerve fibers and cause messages to be 
sent to Man in the general office of the brain. 

But if all this is needed to perceive sound at 
all, we do not yet understand how we can dis¬ 
tinguish such a multitude of sounds one from the 
other. The song of the canary does not sound 
like that of the nightingale, the buzz of the fly is 
not like that of the mosquito. We learn to know 
the voices of different people, we distinguish high 
tones from low tones, loud sounds from soft ones. 
We know the sound of the wind, the sea, the 



THE MUSIC ROOM. 


163 


tones of the piano or violin, the cry of pain or 
the laugh of joy. Can we explain all this ? 
Perhaps not fully, yet we can tell something 
about it. If we take two tuning forks, both 
sounding the same note, and set them up some 
distance from each other and strike one, we 
shall soon hear that the other is singing too; 
this is called sympathetic vibration. Perhaps 
you thought it was only live folks that sympa¬ 
thize. You know when you see any one laugh, 
you want to laugh ; if they cry, you feel like cry¬ 
ing, but here are two pieces of metal, and when 
one sings, the other begins to sing, — that is, if 
they are both tuned to the same note ; if they 
are not, then one may sing all it pleases and the 
other will be silent. 

The explanation is this : Each sound makes its 
own vibration of the air. It is like dropping a 
stone into the water and starting the little circles 
of waves into motion. Any impulse given to the 
air makes little waves which travel on and on. 
The waves made by striking the one tuning fork 
went on till they struck the other one, and as 
that was also its key, it responded. If we should 
put up a great number of these tuning forks, all 
tuned to different keys, and a tune was played 
in a room on any musical instrument, each fork 
would answer when its key-note was struck just 



164 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


as if its name had been called, and one could tell 
just what notes had been sounded by seeing 
which forks were vibrating. If our supply of 
tuning forks were so great that we had one for 
every sound that could be made, each sound 
would set some one of them in motion. That is 
just what we suppose we have in the ear in this 
wonderful organ of Corti. Do you wonder that 
I call the ear a music-room ? If each hair of the 
organ of Corti is sensitive to a particular vibration, 
and communicates that vibration to a nerve-fiber, 
then we hear the sound that corresponds to it. 

If vibrations are slow, they produce low tones ; 
if fast, they produce high tones. According to 
Peyer, 23 vibrations per second are the lowest 
we can hear, and 40,960 vibrations per second, 
the highest. This makes a range of about eleven 
and a half octaves. 

The ear may be educated to analyze sounds. 
The skilled physician listening to the beating of 
the heart can detect sounds that would wholly 
escape the untrained ear, and the musician can 
hear the notes that make harmony of music 
where the uneducated ear hears but the promi¬ 
nent tones that form the melody. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 


THE ORCHESTRION. 

T HE Standard dictionary defines an orches¬ 
trion as a musical instrument designed to 
imitate an orchestra, and I think we have such 
an instrument in our wonderful house. Unlike 
the complicated organ of hearing it is very simple 
in construction, although capable of making a 
marvelous variety of sounds. It can talk and 
sing, it can laugh and cry, it can mew like a cat 
and bark like a dog, crow like a rooster, neigh 
like a horse, and trill like a bird. Did you 
ever see one of these strolling musicians who 
tries to be a whole band in himself ? He has a 
bag-pipe under his arm, cymbals attached to his 
knees, a drum strapped on his back, and I do n’t 
know what other instruments fastened to him 
elsewhere, and he manages to strike each of 
them once in a while. Of course, he has to stay 
in one place while playing, and there is very lit¬ 
tle music to it, after all. It is only a very poor 
imitation of what we are constantly doing with 

[ 165] 


166 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


our orchestrion without thinking that we are 
doing anything wonderful. 

In the first place, we do not have a lot of in¬ 
struments hung clumsily about us in various 
places, but our orchestrion is a compact little 
box that we carry in our throats. We are not 
obliged to stand still when we use it ; we can walk, 
run, or work while talking or singing. 

Our musical instrument is located at the top 
of the laundry stairs, and is called the larynx or 
voice-box. Aura comes through the voice-box 
every time we breathe, but she comes softly un¬ 
less Man wants to use his musical instrument in 
some way, and then she is ready to play it for 
him, and without her he could make no audible 
music. 

The larynx is a cartilaginous box, without top 
or bottom, set at the top of the trachea. The 
little trap-door of the epiglottis shuts down over 
it when food is passing, but lifts to admit air. 
If you look at the picture of the larynx, you will 
see that the greater part of it is made of two 
large cartilages called thyroid , which means 
shield. At the top of each shield we see two 
little horns to which muscles are attached tQ sus¬ 
pend the larynx from the hyoid bone, which is 
the bone of the tongue. You did n’t know you 
had a bone in your tongue ? Well, it does not 



THE ORCHESTRION. 


167 


go through its length, but supports * it at the 
roots, and also holds up the larynx. Below the 
thyroid are two cartilages, called the cricoid , 

shaped like a signet 
ring ; that is what 
cricoid means. On 
the upper edge of 
the cricoid at the 
back are two trian¬ 
gular cartilages 
called arytenoid , 
which play a very 
important part in 
the production of 
sound. These car¬ 
tilages have mus¬ 
cles at each corner 
and are moved by 
these in much the 
same way that the 
triangular metal 
used in the old- 
fashioned bell-pull is worked. 

Two bands of fibrous tissue are stretched 
across the larynx from front to back leav¬ 
ing a chink between, and these are the vocal 
cords. When the air is forced through this 
chink, it makes the cords vibrate, and sound is 







168 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


produced. In ordinary breathing, the cords are 
relaxed, so sound is not made. This orchestrion 
is like a reed instrument. The vocal cords are 
the reeds, the lungs are the bellows, and the 
trachea is a pipe leading from bellows to the 
voice box. How simple is the construction, 
yet how complicated the powers of this unique 
instrument! 

Sound, as we have learned, is made by vibra¬ 
tions of air. If these vibrations are irregular, 
they constitute noise ; if they have a certain 
regularity, they make music. A high note has 
very quick vibrations ; a low note, slow vibra¬ 
tions. Generally, instruments making the same 
note have different qualities of tone, because of 
what is called the overtones of each. 

Loudness of tone is produced by the force with 
which air is sent out through the larynx. The 
cords are made longer or shorter by the action 
of the triangular cartilages. This determines 
the pitch of the tone ; the shorter and tighter 
the cords, the faster the vibration and the higher 
the note ; the longer and looser the cords, the 
slower the vibrations and the lower the note. At 
about fourteen years of age the larynx enlarges, 
and the voice changes, becoming lower in tone. 
Voices of women are higher than those of men 
because the vocal cords are shorter. Children’s 



THE ORCHESTRION. 


169 


are shorter still, and their voices are correspond¬ 
ingly higher. 

The quality of voice is affected by the shape of 
the throat, mouth, larynx, and trachea, and 
also by the knowledge of how to use these or 
gans. One can cultivate the habit of talking in 
a high and disagreeable voice, or in one that is 
low and soft. The poet says, ‘ ‘ A low voice is 
an excellent thing 'in woman, ” and I think he 
might have said in everybody. The voice marks 
to a very great degree the cultivation of the indi¬ 
vidual, and also tells much about his character. 
The high voice is irritating, and often betokens 
irritation. People scold in a high voice, and I 
think I am safe in saying that to be scolded never 
makes a person want to do better. The low 
voice tells more of deep feeling, and appeals to 
the better nature. If you want to arouse ail the 
rebellion there is in a child’s nature, talk in a 
high voice. If you want to move him to good 
impulses, speak low and soft. 

Having in our possession such a magnificent 
musical instrument, we should learn how to use 
it not only in singing, but in speaking and read¬ 
ing aloud, using tones that soothe and comfort 
rather than those that irritate and offend. 

The hard palate and nasal passages form a 
sort of sounding board, and by their vibrations 




170 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


increase the resonance of tones. We say a man 
talks through his nose, when,, in fact, that is just 
what he does not do. The so-called nasal tone 
is made because the nasal passages are closed. 
The range of the human voice is about four oc¬ 
taves,— that is, from the lowest note of a base 
voice to the highest note of a soprano. It is sel¬ 
dom that an individual can sing over a range of 
more than two and a half octaves. 

We have only spoken of the production of 
musical tones. We would like to know some¬ 
thing of the formation of speech, and we find 
that the tongue, lips, cheeks, palate, and pillars 
of the throat are all used in making vocal sounds, 
or in modifying the vibrations of air in various 
ways so as to produce peculiar sounds which we 
recognize as vowels or consonants, and the union 
of these forms words. In spoken words, we do 
not greatly vary the pitch, though we do not talk 
altogether on one tone, while in singing, we vary 
the pitch of tones as well as their length, and 
give them with a rhythm, which we call time. 
That is, the vibrations are repeated in a certain 
order which is pleasing to the ear. 

Sometimes we find a bodily house in which the 
orchestrion is silent. The individual is mute. 
We used to think that was because he had no 
power to speak. We know now that it is be- 



THE ORCHESTRION. 


171 


cause the organ of Corti in the inner ear will not 
respond to Aura when she plays on the drum of 
the ear. The person is deaf, we say ; and, as he 
hears no sounds, he makes no attempt to imitate 
sounds with his vocal organs. He is mute merely 
because he is deaf. Formerly, the child born deaf 
was only taught to talk with his fingers, but now 
he is taught to talk, even though he cannot hear. 
If he can see, he can learn to read the motion of 
the lips. If he cannot see, he can learn to read the 
movements of the lips and larynx with his fingers. 
Have you not read of Helen Keller, the little girl 
who cannot see, and yet has learned to talk and 
hear through her fingers by putting them on the 
lips and throat of those who are talking to her ? 
She is a bright, happy, well-educated, little girl in 
spite of her affliction, and we who can hear and 
see and speak, ought to thank the divine Architect 
both with heart and voice. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 


THE LIBRARY. 

D O N’T you just enjoy a stormy winter day ? 

The wind may howl, the sleet tap on the 
window-pane with its icy fingers, but it does n’t 
frighten us, for the fire glows cheerily, the big 
chair beckons invitingly, and all around the walls 
of the library are books, books, books, waiting 
to be read; books of travel, of history, of po¬ 
etry, of romance, the brightest, wittiest, most 
entrancing thoughts of the great minds of all 
ages, yours just for the looking at them. What 
could be more enjoyable ? But perhaps your 
books are not many, only a few dear friends that 
a slim purse has allowed you to gather around 
you. They are in plain bindings on a simple 
pine shelf, but how you love them ! They begin 
back with the friends of your childhood; dear 
little Dotty Dimple and Prudy Parlin,- Robinson 
Crusoe, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and all the sweet, 
familiar faces that have not been displaced by 
the older friends loved just as dearly, Paul Dom- 
bey, Little Dorrit, Tom Brown, Robert Fal- 
[172] 


THE LIBRARY. 


173 


coner, Lorna Doone, Sir Gibbie, and a host of 
others. How you love the familiar bindings 
even, and you take them up and caress them as 
if they knew how dear they were to you, and to 
part with one of them nearly breaks your heart. 

You cannot take your books as you go about 
your work or play, and yet do you not have them 
with you ? Ah yes, you have stored them away 
in the library of your wonderful house, a com¬ 
pany of dear friends who will ever be with you. 
You began this library far back in your child¬ 
hood ; and if you have been wise in the selec¬ 
tion of authors, you have now quite a collection 
of literature that you can enjoy at any time or 
place, or at any hour of the day or night. 

Perhaps you have not appreciated this library 
of yours. When you come to glance over its 
contents, you see only a higgledy-piggledy col¬ 
lection of scraps. There ’s an arithmetic with a 
part of the multiplication table left out, and — 
O dear! what a state fractions is in ! There’s a 
grammar with only a few leaves in it, and they 
are filled with a collection of words which you 
do n’t understand ; and the geography ! why, in 
it, the Nile and Niger unite to form the Ohio, 
New York City has moved over in the State of 
Rhode Island, and you could not find Abyssinia 
if you tried all day. The most complete collec- 



174 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


tion of poems is Mother Goose’s Melodies, and 
there are just a few broken and disconnected 
verses from the Bible. O, my dear, you really 
must begin to get things into better shape. 
What is this big bundle in the corner ? Dime 
novels ? I wish you could just take them all out 
and burn them up. They occupy so much space 
that ought to be filled with other things. It is 
one disadvantage of this library that you keep 
its contents even if you give them away, and the 
harder you try to forget them, the surer you are 
to remember them. There is one thing you can 
do, you can crowd them out. If from this time 
on you read no more foolish stories, but read 
good books, interesting and valuable books, 
gradually this pile of nonsense will fade away 
and grow dim, and in time, I hope, will vanish 
altogether. 

Now let us see what else you have collected in 
your wonderful library. Where is your diction¬ 
ary ? O, it’s rather small, is n’t it ? And now I 
look it over I see it contains a good many rather 
queer words, and the spelling seems to be a little 
unreliable ; and here, on this page where you 
do n’t want me to look, are words that make me 
very sad to see. Let us fasten those leaves to¬ 
gether and never peep at those words again. 
How many good, honest words do you suppose 



THE LIBRARY. 


175 


your dictionary contains ? — Not very many. 
Some people go through life with a vocabulary 
of only about three hundred words. Your vo¬ 
cabulary means the words which you understand 
and use correctly. 

If you should learn a new word and its mean¬ 
ing every day for a year, your vocabulary would 
begin to grow very rapidly, would n’t it ? What 
would be the use of so many words ? It enables 
us to express different shades of meaning. No 
two words mean just exactly the same thing. I 
have heard of a young lady who had only two 
phrases with which to express her admiration, or 
her detestation. The things that she admired 
were “simply perfect,” the ones she disliked 
were “perfectly simple.” 

If you like something very much, you probably 
say it is “perfectly lovely,” or “awfully nice,” 
and it does not matter whether it is a sermon, a 
picture, a person, a dinner, or the weather. We 
like to be rich in money, why not like to be rich 
in words ? Then we should be able to apply our 
adjectives more appropriately. People some¬ 
times make a very ridiculous use of words. I 
have heard them talk of ‘ ‘ beautiful oysters, ” an 
“ elegant prayer meeting,” or a “ handsome piece 
of music.” They had a vocabulary, but they 
had not studied definitions. 



176 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


The library of our bodily house will differ in 
different people. In some, there are great quan¬ 
tities of mathematics ; in some the sciences pre¬ 
dominate ; in some, there are books in French, 
German, Latin, English, and perhaps half a 
dozen other languages. Some libraries have 
many poems, in others there will be scarcely a 
rhyme. Day by day this library should increase 
its stores. There are people who seem to see and 
learn much, yet never store anything away; 
“they can’t remember,” they say. 

You have already understood that this library 
is the memory, and the brain is the organ of 
memory. We have not yet learned just in what 
parts of the brain different memories are located, 
though we know where lies the memory of spoken 
and written words. But we have learned what 
is of greater value, that even if we do n’t know 
just where the book shelves are that contain our 
memory library, we can find the different books 
when we want them, and, better still, we can 
constantly increase their number. 

This power of adding to the treasures of mem¬ 
ory can be greatly cultivated. We can have good 
memories or poor ones, in just the same way 
that we can have strong muscles or weak ones ; 
and that is by exercise or by lack of exercise. 
Do you not think it would be a fine thing to be 



THE LIBRARY. 


177 


able to remember all the valuable facts with 
which we have become acquainted ? How can 
you begin this power ? First, you must take 
into account the fact that the material brain is 
the organ of thought, and to do good work it 
must have good food, the kind of food that will 
keep it in repair. Not only must nutrition be 
supplied through food, but it must be carried to 
the brain by a good circulation ; so, in order to 
have a good memory, we must exercise with the 
muscles so as to keep the blood moving ; and, 
to insure a good circulation, the heart must be 
vigorous — failure of heart power is accompanied 
by failure of memory. 

Then the brain must be exercised. It will not 
retain impressions unless it is trained to do so, 
but it must not be overworked. Fatigue, either 
of body or brain, lessens the power to remember. 
G. J. Holyoke says of his experience in this line, 
that when traveling expenses were the only pay 
he received for his lectures, he used to walk to 
save railroad fare, and would be so weary in the 
evening that both voice and memory were weak¬ 
ened, and he did not find out for some years 
that it was bodily fatigue that had exhausted his 
power of speech, thought, and memory. Nearly 
every grown person knows that when very weary 
he cannot remember even the things he knows 
12 



178 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


best. Violent exercise, then, should not be 
taken just before we need to use our brain. 

Sickness weakens the memory, and various 
drugs taken to promote sleep may quite destroy 
the power of the brain to remember. Age 
weakens the memory because of failure of nu¬ 
trition through diminished blood supply. M. L. 
Holbrook, in his little book on Memory, claims 
that old people can restore memory by persist¬ 
ently exercising it. His plan is to give every¬ 
thing close attention. To recall at night the ex¬ 
periences of the day, to remember the page of a 
book whereon an interesting fact is recorded, to 
commit the names of public men, to learn poetry 
or the Bible ; and he claims that this plan will 
restore the failing memory of the old. A wiser 
plan is never to let the memory fail, knowing 
that to use the brain, to intrust facts to it, to 
compel it to store up words, names, and inci¬ 
dents will keep it strong and reliable, and make 
of it a never failing source of wondrous pleasure 
both to one’s self and to others. 

Each sense has its own memory. We remem¬ 
ber sounds, sights, odors, sensations, and flavors, 
and if two or more senses are united in retaining 
the impression, the more distinct it will be. If, 
for example, we want to gain a clear idea of a 
new fruit so as to remember and describe 



THE LIBRARY. 


179 


it perfectly, we can do it better if we handle 
it, look at it, smell of it, and taste it than if 
we only see it or if we only tasted it without 
seeing. 

Here are a few simple rules for improving or 
strengthening the memory. First : Never try to 
learn too much at one time. You will commit a 
poem faster by learning one line at a time and 
four lines a day, than you will by attempting to 
commit the whole poem at once. Second : Un¬ 
derstand what you are trying to learn ; if you 
do n’t understand, it becomes a collection of 
words without value. Third : Learn something 
every day, be it ever so little. Let the brain 
understand that it must work continually in the 
storing away of memories. Fourth : Go over 
your memory lessons often, and, if possible, at 
regular times to see if you remember them. 
Fifth : Arrange facts to be remembered in an order 
that seems naturally to connect them, so that, if 
possible, one will suggest the other. 

Sixth: In quoting, be careful to use the exact 
words of the author so as to learn with precision 
and exactness of memory. Seventh: Make ab¬ 
stracts of things desired to be remembered. To 
write them down, brings in the eye to aid the 
mind. To remember forms, make a drawing, if 
possible, for the same purpose. Eighth: In 



180 


OUR BODILY. DWELLING. 


travel, have a map, and locate on it towns, 
streams, etc. In reading, recall the location of 
places mentioned or find them on the map, if not 
familiar with them, so that you will have an idea 
of the places where the events narrated occurred. 
Attention, repetition, and classification seem to 
be the most important aids to memory. 

Mr. Boring likens memorizing to photograph¬ 
ing, and says four things are needed in both ; a 
sensitive plate, exposure, a developer, and a fixa¬ 
tive. In memorizing, the mind is the sensitive 
plate; placing before the mind the object to be 
remembered is the exposure ; attention is the 
mental developer, and repetition the mental fixa¬ 
tive. 

We have a musical memory which enables us 
to recall to mind the music that we have heard, 
or to fix in the memory new pieces of music, so 
that we can play or sing them without the notes ; 
and the memory of old familiar, songs and hymns 
becomes a very great source of pleasure as we 
advance in years. 

The library of Memory is one that we must 
read over and over again whether we will or not, 
for our memories are really ourselves. If we 
could forget all our sorrows and pains and recall 
only our joys and pleasures, we should, in reality, 
have lost a great part of ourselves, and as we 



THE LIBRARY. 


181 


cannot forget if we would, we will prove our 
wisdom by reading good books, choosing wise 
friends, and doing lovely deeds, for these will 
add not only to the happiness of our earthly life 
but to the joys of eternity. 

As Charles Kingsley says : — 

“ Be good, dear child, and let who will be clever ; 

Do noble deeds, not dream them all day long ; 

So shalt thou make life, death, and that vast forever, 
One grand, sweet song.” 



CHAPTER XXIX. 


THE PICTURE GALLERY. 

M EMORY is not only a library but also a pic¬ 
ture gallery. Here are stored away many 
of the scenes photographed by the eye, or the 
pictures which at various times, imagination has 
painted. We begin this gallery in our early 
childhood, and among the first pictures placed 
there are pictures of father, mother, brothers, 
and sisters, the old home, and school-house, — 

“The orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wild- 
wood, 

And every loved spot that our infancy knew.” 

Phebe Cary says : —- 

“ Of all the grand old pictures, 

Which hang on Memory’s wall, 

Is one of a dim old forest, 

The dearest of them all.” 

And we find that the poets make their strong¬ 
est appeals to our hearts when they are talking 
of the fond memories of their childhood. 

[182] 


the picture gallery. 


183 


“ I remember, I remember, 

The house where I was born ; 

The little window where the sun, 

Came creeping in at morn,” 

says one. Others sing of ‘ ‘ The Old House at 
Home, ” * * The Old Oaken Bucket, ” or “ The Old 
Swimming Hole ; ” and every time they sound a 
note it puts in motion those tones of influence 
which set our own heartstrings throbbing. 
Blessed are we, if, in the retrospect of child-life, 
we have only beautiful scenes to deck the walls 
of Memory. 

Sometimes, however, there are scenes we 
would be glad to forget — remembrances of 
deeds we once did that now make our hearts 
ache. I have heard of a little girl who was 
asked by her sick mother to bring her a drink of 
water, and the child was unwilling, and went 
away and stayed all day at her play, and came 
home at night to find that her dear mother had 
died. What a sorrowful picture to look at dur¬ 
ing the long, long years to come ! 

It is sometimes hard to separate the Memory 
pictures of childhood from those of Imagination. 
We used perhaps to hear some one often spoken 
of, and pictured a personality belonging to the 
name that became as real as if we had actually 
known the individual. We have heard of some 



184 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


wonderful deed of our own childhood so often 
related that we imagine we really remember its 
occurrence. Then, too, we have illustrated the 
books we have read with pictures of our own 
imagination so that they are almost like memory, 
so real do they seem. You have imagined Rob¬ 
inson Crusoe in his island dress so often that you 
would recognize him if you were to meet him on 
the street. And you certainly have been inside 
the “Old Curiosity Shop,” and have seen Little 
Nell. You remember perfectly well how ridicu¬ 
lous “Alice in Wonderland” looked when she 
nibbled the cake, and her neck grew so long, and 
she exclaimed, “ Curiouser and curiouser ! ” 
Memory and Imagination are two marvelous 
artists, ever busy painting for you. Come, draw 
your chair to the fire, close your eyes, and look 
at the scenes they delineate. They come like 
living creatures trooping across your mental can¬ 
vas, one picture fading away as another comes 
to take its place. Some bring us smiles, Gthers 
bring tears, some you would like to look at for¬ 
ever, others you would fain forget ; but there 
they are, coming and going, indelibly impressed 
on the brain, each day adding to the faces, 
scenes, and landscapes, a collection continually 
increasing from birth to death. 



CHAPTER XXX. 


THE CHAMBER OF PEACE. 

W E have learned where, in the brain, lie cer¬ 
tain centers of motion, and we are con¬ 
vinced that there are centers of thought and 
feeling, though we have not yet located them. 
We ourselves can visit the hidden chambers in 
this marvelous upper story of our wonderful 
house, but we cannot tell others where they are 
to be found, nor may we take even our dearest 
friends with us into their secret recesses. 

Some of these apartments are not very de¬ 
lightful. They may be dark and full of pictures 
of evil, and it makes us miserable to visit them, 
and yet perhaps we love to linger in them. 
They are little alcoves connected with the pic¬ 
ture gallery, and we employ an artist called Im¬ 
agination to paint for us the pictures that adorn 
their walls. 

There is the Chamber of Hatred, and for this 
Imagination paints dark, forbidding scenes, in 
which we see ourselves doing unkind things to 
wound or injure those we do not love, and we 

[i85] 


186 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


take an evil pleasure in imagining the pain or 
grief we can cause. There is the Chamber of 
Envy, and here we sit while Imagination paints 
the fine carriages and horses, elegant houses, 
splendid dwellings, and dresses, the beautiful 
faces and desirable belongings that some one 
else owns, and we say, “O I wish I owned 
them ! ” and then we are very unhappy because 
they are not ours. To linger long in this room 
is very dangerous, for sometimes a dark spirit 
called Temptation creeps in and whispers to us 
that we might possess ourselves of some of these 
belongings of others. Theft, murder, and all 
sorts of crime are planned in this dark chamber. 
O let us hurry away from the Chamber of Envy 
and shut the door so tight that the evil tempta¬ 
tion will be imprisoned therein never to get out, 
because we will not open the door. 

The Chamber of Selfishness, I think, must be 
the central room around which all the other 
dark alcoves are gathered. In this room Im¬ 
agination paints many strange scenes. He de¬ 
lineates us just as we think we are, and then 
we fancy that people do not pay us enough atten¬ 
tion. He shows us the beautiful possessions of 
others and contrasts them with our own meager 
belongings, and we are jealous and unhappy. 
If we feel moved to do a generous deed and 



THE CHAMBER OR PEACE. 


187 


chance to slip into the Chamber of Selfishness, 
we at once see a picture of how much trouble it 
will be and of how little gratitude we will re¬ 
ceive in return, so we close the door and stay 
shut in with ourselves, and then perhaps wonder 
why we are so unhappy. 

There are many dark rooms that we visit, but 
let us look away from these to the bright and 
lively chambers wherein Man finds peace and 
comfort. These charming rooms are alcoves 
surrounding one central apartment, the Chamber 
of Love, and here Imagination paints with bright 
and glowing colors the most entrancing scenes. 
I picture this Chamber of Love as a circular 
room with a dome-like roof, azure-tinted, glow¬ 
ing with a soft, ethereal light reflected from the 
ceiling and from the exquisite pictures upon the 
walls — pictures in which kindly, unselfish deeds 
are depicted in all their beauty. How often the 
faces of father, mother, sister, or friend appear in 
these scenes ! — the faces of those whom we love 
and for whom it is so easy to do some deed of 
kindness ! But brightest of all are the portrayals 
of lovely things we have done to some one who 
has been unkind to us ; and as we look, words of 
golden light gleam out upon the walls and we 
read, “ Love them that hate you;” “ Perfect love 
casteth out fear;” “God is love;” and our 



188 


OUR BODILY DWELLING , 


hearts grow tender, and gentle tears fall from 
our eyes, and we feel inspired with impulses 
toward all that is holy and best. 

And then the doorway opens into the most 
secret and lovely room of all, the Chamber of 
Peace, wherein we meet and talk with the spirit 
of Divine Love. I think this was the room that 
Jesus was thinking of when he said, “ Enter 
into thy closet, and when thou hast shut the 
door, pray to.thy Father which is in secret; and 
thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward 
thee openly.” He did not mean a closet of the 
house we have built for ourselves, but he meant 
a secret room within ourselves, a place where 
the world can be shut out and we can find rest 
and peace. I fear we do not seek this room as 
often as we might, for here are great stores of 
comfort for every sorrow, of rest in all weariness, 
of strength in all trial. It does not matter that 
we do not know just where, in the material 
brain, this Chamber of Peace is located, we 
can learn the way thither. 

“ Too eager I must not be to understand ; 

How should the work the Master goes about 
Fit the vague sketch my compasses have planned. 

I am His house — for him to go in and out. 

He builds me now,— and if I cannot see 
At any time what he is doing with me, 

’ Tis that he makes the house for me too grand. 



THE CHAMBER OF PEACE. 


189 


“The house is not for me, it is for Him ; 

His royal thoughts require many a stair, 
Many a tower, many an outlook fair, 

Of which I have no thought, and need no 
care. 

Where I am most perplexed, it may be there 
Thou makest a secret chamber, holy, dim, 
Where thou wilt come to help my deepest 
prayer.” 


— Geo. Macdo7iald. 



“Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant, 
Leave not its tenant when its walls decay ; 

O Love divine, O Helper ever present, 

Be thou my strength and stay.” 

—John Greenleaf Whittier. 


PART II. 


The Guests Man Entertains in His 
Bodily Dwelling. 































, 
















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*» 






















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. 














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CHAPTER I. 


HELPFUL GUESTS. 

“ \ MAN is known by the company he keeps,” 
Ti says the old adage, and I think we can 
judge pretty well of a person whom we have 
never seen if we know his company. If he 
associates with refined, intelligent, Christian 
people, we can guess that he himself is of the 
same character. If his friends are dissolute, 
profane loafers, we know at once that he is not 
an industrious, moral man. It is also true that 
a man’s house will tell something about him and 
his companions. When a house shows taste in 
its construction, neatness and care in its keeping, 
we judge by these things of the man that owns 
it, and we quickly form an opinion about him. 

The appearance of the body indicates very 
clearly what kind of guests are entertained 
therein, for all visitors may be classed under two 
heads, constructive or destructive. They come 
either to build up or to tear down, and the effects 
of their work are seen on the outside of the house. 
The builders keep him plump and rosy, with 

[ *93 ] 


13 


194 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


bright eyes, active limbs, and a general appear¬ 
ance of well being. The destroyers make him 
very pale and thin, or they fill him up with a 
poor quality of material and make him look too 
fat. They take the brightness out of his eyes 
and strength from his limbs. It is therefore very 
important that Man shall entertain only those 
who come to help him keep his house in repair, 
and these are called foods. 

Man chooses his own guests but he often in¬ 
vites to his house those that injure him. He 
does not know their true character. He thinks 
them friendly because they have a fine appear¬ 
ance, or Taste says he likes them, and so they 
are invited in over and over again, and do great 
mischief before he finds them out. If we ought 
to choose any companions with great care, it 
should be those who are to come in and dwell 
with us and become a part of our household. 

The first and most important food-guest is 
Oxygen. He comes in with Aura on her first 
visit and begins his beneficent work ; in truth, 
Aura comes principally to bring Oxygen, and his 
business is to cleanse the impure blood from its 
dark color to the bright scarlet of pure blood. 
The blood could not do its work in any part of 
the body if it were not plentifully supplied with 
oxygen. We are told that a man who is at rest 



HELPFUL GUESTS. 


105 


consumes eighteen cubic feet of oxygen in a day ; 
and, of course, if he is at work, he will take in 
as much more. Eighteen cubic feet ! That 
would be all that could be held in a room 
eighteen feet long, e ight ee n feet high, and eight¬ 
hs feet wide, and remember that this is not air, 
but oxygen, and that will give you an idea of 
how important a food it is. It will also show 
you how necessary it is that the air of rooms and 
houses should be constantly changing so that 
oxygen may be renewed, for you will remember 
that carbonic acid gas is thrown out at each 
breath and poisons the air. This gas is a deadly 
foe to health, and, strange to say, is born in 
the house, in the waste of tissue. It is the busi¬ 
ness of air in breathing, to bring in oxygen, and 
to take out the carbonic acid gas. We think it 
very important that we should eat three times a 
day, but we sometimes forget that this most im¬ 
portant food, oxygen, should freely enter our 
house eighteen or twenty times a minute. 

The second guest brought to our house is a 
pale, sweet creature called Milk. Although she 
looks so delicate, and we sometimes sneer at her 
as being “ only food for babies/’ she is in reality 
a perfect food, bringing with her everything 
needed to keep our house in repair. Milk is al¬ 
bumen, sugar, and fat dissolved in water, which 




196 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


you see makes it ready at once to be easily 
assimilated; it is especially suited to infants, as 
they at first have no saliva to digest starch, and 
cannot appropriate such foods as arrow-root, 
rice, sago, and such things, which are often un¬ 
wisely fed to them. After a few months the 
salivary glands begin to work, and then starches 
can be digested. 

You will remember that the foods are divided 
into albuminoids, amyloids, sugars, and oils. 
The albuminoids are also called nitrogenous 
foods as they contain nitrogen, an important 
part of the tissues but not contained in all the 
foods. The most important albuminoid foods 
are milk, eggs, meat, fish, and grains. Starches, 
sugars, and fats are also classed as carbo-hy¬ 
drates, and these are largely found in the vege¬ 
table kingdom. They are the foods that make 
fat, heat, and energy but are not built into tissue. 
As foods, they are very important but alone will 
not build up the body. We find these different 
elements combined in various proportions in dif¬ 
ferent foods, and that is why we need to eat a 
variety so as to be sure to get all that is neces¬ 
sary to maintain the body in health. Some 
foods contain the right proportion much more 
nearly than others. 

Milk and eggs are nearly perfect foods though 



HELPFUL GUESTS. 


11)7 


they contain no starch. Wheat is considered 
as the standard food. It contains nitrogen and 
the carbo-hydrates in nearly the right proportion. 
I mean whole wheat, not white flour, which has 
too large a proportion of starch, so to eat white 
bread alone would be to take in too much starch, 
and it would be necessary to eat something else 
to supply albumen. 

One of the most important foods is water, as 
the body is itself nearly three fourths water, and 
a great quantity of the waste material passes out 
in the form of water. We find that a large pro¬ 
portion of the food that we eat is water, but we 
need also to drink. It has been stated that the 
quantity of solid food that an adult man, doing 
an average amount of work, should take in dur¬ 
ing one day is twenty-three ounces the quan¬ 
tity of water, between sixty and seventy ounces. 
You feel rather inclined to dispute my statement 
that the body is largely made up of water, but 
the chemists tell us that even the bones are one- 
eighth water. Fruits are very important foods 
because they contain a great deal of water, and 
also a large amount of salts; I did n’t say salt, 
but salts—that is a term used for the inorganic 
foods. 

We have as yet only talked of the organic 
foods, that is, those that are formed of living 




198 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


structures, as plants or animals, but we find 
in the body other elements called inorganic, 
which are not found in living structure ; these 
are soda, potash, iron, lime, silica, and so on. 
These being found in the body, must be supplied 
in the food. We cannot eat iron, lime, or these 
inorganic substances in their crude state, but 
plants can. They take from the soil all these 
elements and make them over into themselves, 
and then we get them from the plants; or from 
other animals that have eaten the plants. If we 
do not eat foods which contain these inorganic 
substances in sufficient quantity, we break down. 
The bones contain a great deal of lime, and if 
they cannot find it in the food, they become 
curved and twisted and the body grows out of 
shape. 

Phosphorus is an inorganic substance needed 
to build up nerves and brain ; silica is used in 
the hair and nails ; and when we look about to 
see where we can find these substances made 
over for our use, we learn that phosphorus is 
found especially in the germ of grains, and silica 
in their outer covering, and this is another rea¬ 
son why we should not bolt our flour, but should 
leave in it all the elements as they were placed 
there by God himself. James Russell Lowell 
says, “ Behind the nutty loaf is the mill-wheel ; 



HELPFUL GUESTS. 


199 


behind the mill-wheel is the wheat-field ; on the 
wheat-field rests the sunlight ; above the sun is 
God.” 

If we were to invite into our bodily dwelling 
only those guests which build us up, and these 
in the right proportion, it is doubtful if we should 
ever know much about sickness. This being 
the case, would it not be well to study the mat¬ 
ter carefully, not considering merely what tastes 
good, but what is needed to keep us in repair, 
and to avoid those things which are destructive ? 
Great and good men have at all times given 
thought to the subject of food and have left on 
record many wise sayings in regard to it. If we 
knew the value of various kinds of food, we 
might even cure diseases by selecting a proper 
article of diet instead of using drugs. Dr. Hun¬ 
ter, a very eminent physician and a sufferer from 
gout, found apples a remedy, and insisted that 
all his patients should use apples instead of wine 
and roast beef. Professor Farrady says, “ If 
families could be induced to substitute the apple 
(round, ripe,, and luscious) for the pie, cake, 
candy, and other sweetmeats with which chil¬ 
dren are so often stuffed, there would be a dimi¬ 
nution of doctors’ bills.” Many of the ancient 
writers have left on record their belief in a sim¬ 
ple diet, often entirely discarding animal food. 



200 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


Socrates says, “To fare well implies the partak¬ 
ing of such food as does not disagree with body 
and mind, hence only those fare well who live 
temperately.” In ancient Greece the food was 
plain and simple, and the athletes were trained 
entirely on vegetable food. We use the word 
vegetarian for one who eats only vegetables, but 
I have seen it stated that the word is derived 
from the Latin vegetns , which means strong, 
robust, and hardy, and it is perhaps because 
vegetable food tends to health that we have 
come to call those who eat it vegetarians. 

It is claimed by those who object to animal food 
that Milton was a vegetarian, and that Newton 
wrote his “Principia” while living entirely on 
vegetable food. It is known that Shelley ate no 
meat. It is said by Xenophon, that Cyrus, king 
of Persia, was brought up on a diet of water, 
bread, and cresses till his fifteenth year when 
honey and raisins were added. Xenophon also 
describes the outfit of a Spartan soldier who 
lived principally on bread and dried fruit. His 
ordinary outfit weighed seventy-five pounds, 
which was often increased to a full hundred, 
and this load was often carried at the rate of 
four miles an hour, for twelve hours a day, 
many days in succession ; so even if we do not 
admit that it is best to give up meat eating en- 



HELPFUL GUESTS. 


201 


tirely, we must confess that health and strength 
can be maintained without meat, and certainly, 
there is more that is pleasing to think of in the 
fields of ripened grain, in the fruits hanging from 
the boughs, than there is in the slaughter of 
animals. 

Ancient Gauls who were very brave and 
strong lived on milk, berries, and herbs. Their 
bread was made of nuts, and they had a strange 
fashion of wearing a metal ring around the body 
the size of which was regulated by law. If any 
man grew larger around than his ring, he was 
thought to be a lazy glutton and consequently 
was disgraced. Certainly the motto of that 
people must have been one which would be wise 
for us all to adopt, ‘ ‘ Let appetite wear rea¬ 
sons’ golden chain, and find in due restraint its 
luxury. ” 



CHAPTER II. 


SPICY VISITORS. 


HEN I began to speak of foods as visitors 



V V to our bodily dwelling, I did not realize how 
much they are like real folks. We all know 
people who are plain and unpretending, but so 
reliable and trustworthy that we value them ex¬ 
ceedingly. We are glad to see them every day, 
and if in need of friends, we call for them 
instead of our more showy companions. We 
sometimes say of such a one that he is “ as good 
as gold.” The Italians have a better saying, 

‘ ‘ He is as good as bread, ” and that is a great 
compliment. What is better than good, honest, 
plain bread when we are in need of food ? Such 
constant friends as bread, meat, and potatoes 
we are glad to welcome every day as helpful 
guests. 

We enjoy occasional visits from people who 
are very sweet, but if they come too often or 
stay too long, we get very tired of them. This 
is true of sweet foods, they cloy the appetite ; 
we can take them along with plainer foods, but 


[202] 


SPICY VISITORS . 


203 


they are a poor dependence for the work of 
building us up. 

Then there are people who are so lively, so 
clever, their wit is so pungent, their jests so 
spicy, that their coming stirs us up into unwonted 
activity, and when they are gone, we say we “just 
feel all tired out.” Such guests sometimes 
come to our marvelous house. We call them 
condiments. They are known more particularly 
as pepper, mustard, spices, sauces, etc. Many 
people have accustomed themselves to foods so 
highly seasoned that they cannot enjoy natural 
flavors, just as people become so fond of society 
that entertains that they can’t enjoy a good, 
serious, sensible conversation, and that is unfor¬ 
tunate. But these spicy food-guests are, in 
truth, more to be avoided than spicy people. 
They are not builders, they are sources of irrita¬ 
tion. Mustard on the outside of the body pro¬ 
duces a blister, and can you imagine any one 
blistering himself because he enjoys it ? Why 
then, should he like to irritate in the same 
way the more sensitive mucous membrane of 
the mouth and stomach ? The same thing may 
be said of pepper and all pungent, biting sub¬ 
stances, they irritate and cause inflammation of 
the mucous membrane. Every physiology men¬ 
tions Alexis St. Martin, a man in Canada, who 




204 


OUR BODILY DWELLING . 


in 1848 had a wound in his stomach which 
healed up, leaving a flap of flesh that could be 
pushed aside, giving a view of the inside of the 
stomach and what it was doing. Fortunately 
for science, the doctor who had him in charge 
was wise enough to improve this opportunity, 
and because of this we now know, as never be¬ 
fore, some of the secrets of our bodily kitchen. 

Dr. Beaumont reports that when St. Martin 
took pepper and other condiments with his food, 
the mucous membrane of the stomach grew red, 
just as the eye would if the same substances 
were put into it. Why do we like them, then, 
if they are so irritating ? I doubt if we do like 
them naturally. Did you ever see a baby that 
wanted pepper ? I never did. I have seen chil¬ 
dren two or three years old who would pepper 
their food, but they did it at first because they 
saw the older people do it, and after a time they 
grew to be fond of these things. It is one 
peculiarity of our bodies that they can soon 
accustom themselves to very hurtful things and 
seem to miss them when they are taken away. 

I once heard of a woman who could not sleep 
after her snoring husband died unless some one 
ground the coffee mill in her room, but I suppose 
none of us would think that an argument in favor 
of snoring as a lullaby. If the story is true, 



SPICY VISITORS. 


205 


which is doubtful, it only illustrates the fact that 
we can become accustomed to very disagreeable 
things. 

In the case of condiments, such as pepper and 
mustard, the nerves of sensation complain at 
first of their biting, but by and by they find 
complaining does no good, so they keep quiet and 
finally end by liking to be bitten. It is another 
illustration of Pope’s lines concerning vice. He 
says : — 

“ Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, 

That to be hated needs but to be seen ; 

But seen too oft, familiar with her face, 

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.” 

So it is with these stimulating substances ; for 
all condiments are stimulants, and stimulants are 
things that get more work out of you, without 
putting strength into you, and that is not desir¬ 
able. The spices we add to foods do not build 
up any tissues of the body, but they act like 
spurs or whips, to excite the nerves and mucous 
membrane to greater activity. But do they not 
help digestion ? Science says not. A series of 
experiments has been conducted by Dr. J. H. 
Kellogg, at the Battle Creek, Mich., Sanitarium. 
He gave a breakfast to a healthy young man, 
and an hour after, by means of a stomach pump, 
took it away, and had a chemical analysis made 



206 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


of it to learn the effects of different substances, 
and he learned that all condiments actually re¬ 
tard digestion. 

One fact in regard to condiments, that to me is 
an argument against them, is that their use must 
be increased to maintain our enjoyment of them, 
which is not true of the foods, and this proves 
that their use deadens the nerves of sensation. 
This, of course, lessens our power to appreciate 
delicate flavors. Where the mucous membrane 
of the mouth and stomach is seared and burned 
by high seasoning, the bland and ethereal flavor 
of food as God gave it to us is lost, and so we 
actually miss the highest enjoyment of eating 
in our unwise effort to create new pleasures of 
appetite. 



CHAPTER III. 

QUESTIONABLE GUESTS. 

I T is not a very welcome task to warn people 
against those whom they believe to be their 
true friends, but it is sometimes our duty, and 
therefore should be bravely done. I hope you 
young people have as yet never made the inti¬ 
mate acquaintance of two foreigners who are fre¬ 
quent guests in the bodily house, although, no 
doubt, you are very familiar with their appear¬ 
ance. One of them has a dark complexion and 
is rather bitter unless associated with milk and 
sugar. His name is Coffea Arabica and you 
know him as Coffee. He was introduced into 
England and France about two hundred years 
ago ; so if you think people cannot get along 
without coffee, you have only to study up what 
was done in France and England in deeds of 
bravery or in literature, before coffee was ever 
known. 

Coffee is a native of Abyssinia. It found its 
way into Arabia in the sixth century, and prob¬ 
ably as a substitute for wine when that drink 
was prohibited by the Koran. By the sixteenth 

[207] 


208 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


century it had reached Cairo, in Egypt; but 
here the great men rose up against it, and de¬ 
clared it contrary to the law of their prophet 
and injurious both to soul and body. Ministers 
preached against it, and it doubtless would have 
been abandoned had not the Sultan come to 
its aid and declared it to be not objectionable. 
In Constantinople and also in Italy, it met 
with opposition both from the clergymen and the 
physicians. Medical science to-day calls coffee 
a diffusible stimulant, and the testimony of phy¬ 
sicians would certainly induce us to be wary of 
making a friend of coffee. Professor Hitchcock 
says the bewitching influence both of tea and 
coffee lies in their narcotic property. 

Dr. Bartholow says: “If used to excess, as a 
beverage, coffee deranges the organs of digestion, 
producing acidity, flatulence, pyrosis, eructations, 
headache, vertigo, ringing in the ears, and wake¬ 
fulness.” Dr. Emmet, another authority, says : 
‘ ‘ I find coffee, even when weak, to exert a very 
deleterious influence, in consequence of its indi¬ 
rect influence on nutrition. Whenever a patient 
has become addicted to the use of stimulants, 
anodynes, or coffee, an effort must be made at 
once, without a compromise, to break up the 
dependence upon either of these insidious poi¬ 
sons to the nervous system.” 



Q UES TI ON ABLE G UES TS. 


209 


It is sometimes said as an argument in favor of 
the use of coffee that it is an indirect food be¬ 
cause it checks wastes. In the normal healthy 
body the checking of waste is not desirable. If 
all the activities of the body are accompanied by 
destruction of tissue, that dead material should 
be removed from the body, and any interference 
with this process must be more or less injurious. 
A very serious objection to the use of coffee by 
young people is that it satisfies the desire for 
food without contributing anything of any great 
value to the nourishment of the body. Children 
and young people are continually growing by the 
addition of new material to their bodily organs, 
they therefore need to eat plenty of nourishing 
food, and if coffee satisfies the appetite so that 
they are inclined to eat less than the body actu¬ 
ally demands, it is easy to understand that it is 
doing the body an injury. 

Many people imagine that the powers of intel¬ 
lect are increased by the use of coffee. The 
testimony of a man with originally good intellect 
and moral, powers as to its effect both upon 
mind and morals will be of value. “When I 
awake,” he says, “I have the intelligence and 
activity of an oyster, but immediately after cof¬ 
fee, stores of memory leap, so to speak, to the 
tongue, and talkativeness, haste, and the letting 
*4 



210 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


slip something we should not have mentioned 
are often the consequence. Moderation and 
prudence are always wanting. The cold, reflect¬ 
ive seriousness of our forefathers, the solid firm¬ 
ness of their wills, resolutions, and judgment, the 
duration of their not speedy, but powerful and 
judicious bodily movements,— all this noble, 
original impress of our nature disappears before 
this medicinal beverage, and 'gives way to over- 
hasty attempts, rash resolutions, immature 
decisions, levity and fickleness, talkativeness, 
inconstancy, and rapid mobility of the mus¬ 
cles.” 

The statement is made that caries of the 
bones in young children is connected with the 
use of coffee. It produces also a species of fever 
sometimes called children’s hectic. Their faces 
become pale, and their flesh soft, and when they 
have learned to walk, their step is very un¬ 
steady, their appetite is feeble, they do not grow 
naturally, they are apt to be timid, discontented, 
to sleep badly, are troubled with sore eyes, and 
their teeth come with difficulty. ^Increase of 
heart disease is also, by some physicians, attrib¬ 
uted to the increased use of coffee. 

The other foreigner is named The a Chinensis , 
but he is generally known as Tea, and from his 
complexion designated as Green Tea or Black 



QUESTIONABLE GUESTS. 


211 


Tea. In the quaint diary of Mr. Pepys we find 
the entry Sept. 25, 1660 : “I sent for a cup of 
tee — a China drink, of which I had never drank 
before.” . So we see that until nearly that date 
tea had been unknown in England ; and when 
people tell us that tea is an assistant in mental 
work, we can point them to the fact that a good 
deal of fine intellectual work was done in the 
world before tea was known. In those days the 
facts of physiology and hygiene were not known 
as they now are, and people judged of food 
and drinks, as many yet do, by their feelings, 
and, as tea and coffee made them, for the 
time being “ feel good,” they very naturally sup¬ 
posed them to be good, and attributed many 
virtues to them. As we are very desirous of 
keeping our bodily dwellings in repair, we will 
certainly be willing to hear frank statements of 
scientists in regard to tea and coffee. 

The Reverend John Wesley leaves on record 
that he discovered that tea gave him symptoms 
of paralysis in a shakiness of his hands which 
ceased when he quit tea-drinking. Dr. Beddoes, 
of England, demonstrated that a strong decoction 
of tea is destructive of life, both human and 
animal. Dr. Beaumont, who had charge of 
Alexis St. Martin, of whom we have before 
spoken, observed the effect of tea and coffee upon 




212 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


the lining membrane of the stomach, and says 
that their use has a tendency to debilitate the 
digestive organs. In these statements the doc¬ 
tors are not referring to the effects of adultera¬ 
tions, but to the natural effects of tea and coffee 
themselves, and these evil qualities are increased 
by the addition of injurious substances such as 
indigo, white lead, Prussian blue, etc. 

Hot drinks injure the teeth, the gums, the lining 
of the stomach, and so indirectly the whole sys¬ 
tem. People who drink much while eating do 
not chew their food enough, and so do not mix 
it thoroughly with saliva, and Dr. Beaumont dis¬ 
covered that swallowing food not perfectly mas¬ 
ticated produced eruptions and ulceration of the 
mucous membrane of the stomach. It is said of 
tea, as of coffee, that it lessens the waste of tis¬ 
sue, and therefore is an indirect food. Of this 
fact Dr. Page says that to interfere with, or to 
hinder any of the normal processes of the organ¬ 
ism, especially those most vital to the economy, 
as, for example, that of the constant breaking 
down and excretion of tissue, is not only to in¬ 
vite disease, but the impairment of those func¬ 
tions constitutes disease. 

Professor Albert B. Prescott, of the University 
of Michigan, who, as a chemist, has investigated 
the properties of tea and coffee, says that the 



QUESTIONABLE GUESTS. 


213 


caffein of the one and the thein of the other 
are built on the chemical type of the alkaloid, a 
class of bodies which nature forms in plants but 
not in food-plants. This class of bodies in¬ 
cludes narcotics, stimulants, hypnotics, deliriants ; 
poisons, which either excite or depress the nerv¬ 
ous system. 

Dr. Richardson, a physician and great scien¬ 
tist, asserts that the misery of the women of 
the poorer classes of England is more than 
doubled by the use of tea. Dr. Ferguson, an 
eminent physician studying the effects of tea and 
coffee upon the health and growth of children, 
says that children allowed these beverages aver¬ 
age a gain of four pounds a year between the 
ages of thirteen and sixteen, while those who 
were given milk instead, average fifteen pounds 
a year gain in the same period. Is not all this 
testimony sufficient to make us, who have not 
yet made the intimate acquaintance of these two 
foreigners, say we will not put ourselves into the 
power of companions who bring us nothing of 
good but are so powerful to do harm ? 



CHAPTER IV. 


TREACHEROUS COMPANIONS. 

FRIEND who fails, out and out, to keep 



iA his promise is one who cannot injure us 
greatly, for we soon learn to distrust and avoid 
him, but one who makes us believe he is keeping 
his promise to help us, while, in truth, he is all 
the time secretly injuring us, is the one who can 
do us the greatest harm because of our con¬ 
fidence in him. 

If you employed a man as a special guardian 
of your house, and he promised to take care of 
the premises while you slept, and then he should 
take advantage of your trust, to undermine the 
foundations, to break the windows, to tear down 
the electric wires so that you could receive no 
word of the mischief he was doing, he might, in 
truth, be called a false friend, and you ought to 
feel grateful to any one who would inform you 
of the true state of affairs and warn you against 
trusting one so unworthy. It is such a note I 
would now sound in your ears, warning you 
against a class of visitors who will make wonder¬ 
ful promises of assistance; but, if allowed to 


[214 ] 


TREACHEROUS COMPANIONS. 215 

become your guests, will work great mischief. 
They all come promising to add to Man’s com¬ 
fort, to make him forget his cares, to help him to 
sleep, and to close the complaining mouth of 
Pain, whom Man so often fails to recognize as 
a friend. 

Perhaps the most widely known among these 
false friends is Opium, a dark, unpleasant-look¬ 
ing creature whose influence over Pain is very re¬ 
markable, and it is scarcely to be wondered at 
that Man receives him with a hearty welcome 
when he once learns how quiet Pain becomes 
under the influence of Opium, but when we 
learn the method by which Pain is stilled, we 
find it not desirable. We know that Pain’s 
complaint means that something is wrong about 
the house, and we should seek to know what is 
wrong and right it, then Pain will subside of his 
own accord. But Opium throttles Pain, as it 
were, and prevents his making complaint; or 
more truly, he paralyzes the nerves of sensation 
so that the messages of Pain are not received at 
the General Office, and the mischief of which he 
is complaining goes on uncorrected. Because 
he hears no more grumbling, Man imagines that 
everything is as it should be. After a time, the 
paralyzing influence of Opium passes away, and 
then Pain renews his complaint more loudly, and 



216 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


Man, in his agony, again calls on his false friend 
to come to his aid. In this way he becomes a 
slave to Opium, and the bodily house is thrown 
into such a state of revolution that it is only 
when the tyrant Opium reigns through his para¬ 
lyzing power, that Man has any peace. 

The habit of opium using in various forms, as 
laudanum, morphine, or opium smoking, may 
be called intoxication, from a Greek word toxi- 
con, meaning poison. All these false friends 
are poisons, and they all work in the same fash¬ 
ion by creating such a demand for their presence 
that they become tyrants, and Man their slave. 

The poet Coleridge, who for many years was 
addicted to the use of opium, says, ‘ ‘ My case is 
a species of madness, only that it is a derange¬ 
ment and utter impotence of volition and not of 
the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse 
myself. Go and bid a paralytic in both arms to 
rub them briskly together and that will cure 
him. ‘Alas,’ he would reply, ‘that I cannot 
move my arms is my complaint and misery.’ ” I 
am glad to tell you that Coleridge, after a fear¬ 
ful struggle, was freed from the dominion of 
opium. De Quincy, who was also an opium 
slave but who freed himself from the tyrant, 
says, ‘ ‘ I triumphed, but think not that my suf¬ 
ferings were ended. Think of me as one, who, 




TREACHEROUS COMPANIONS. 


217 


even when four months have passed, is still agi¬ 
tated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, and shat¬ 
tered. ” 

The use of opium affects not only the physical 
system but the moral nature. Dr. Kerr, who 
has made a very thorough study of the effects of 
narcotic poisons, says that under their use, love 
is transformed into hate, and the one who uses 
them, often loathes the sight of those whom he 
used to cherish with the tenderest affection. 
He continues: “Opium transforms the manly, 
high-toned, pleasant companion into an effemi¬ 
nate, driveling, querulous bore. It transcends 
alcohol in the generation of a more irreclaimable 
and incurable diseased condition. Cured alcohol- 
inebriates are not uncommon. Cured opium-in¬ 
ebriates are comparatively few in number. The 
perception is so clouded that they are not amen¬ 
able to intellectual and other elevating influ¬ 
ences. ” 

Another false friend, not much over twenty 
years old, is Chloral Hydrate, whose chief attrac¬ 
tion is his power to produce sleep, but he accom¬ 
plishes this only by utterly destroying the ability 
to sleep. He interferes with digestion, oppresses 
the heart, disturbs circulation, and affects the 
work of the nervous system. Chlorodyne and 
Chloroform are relatives of Chloral Hydrate, and 



2i8 OUA bODILY DWELLING. 

their effect is similar in the deadening of sensa¬ 
tion and the working of mischief while Man is 
unconscious. Cocaine may be included in this 
list. This is a powerful drug, and, like those 
before mentioned, may have a valuable work to 
do in the hands of a skilful physician, but, if 
taken at the will of the individual, soon becomes 
a tyrannical master who caresses only to destroy. 
Its first effect is a feeling of increased mental and 
bodily power, but sleeplessness and depression 
and a train of direful evils follow, and the ulti¬ 
mate tendency is to produce delirium and raving 
madness. Absinthe and Haschish are friends of 
this character, better known in foreign lands 
than in our own. We must not forget to men¬ 
tion ginger as of this class. It is usually as¬ 
sociated with alcohol before its use becomes a 
slavish habit, and so united, it becomes destruc¬ 
tive to the stomach and causes a persistent 
gnawing feeling through depraved mucous mem¬ 
brane and nerve disturbances. These ginger 
extracts are usually purchased by women who 
perhaps have little idea that they are becoming 
drunkards by their use. 

When we remember that only those sub¬ 
stances which contain the material to rebuild 
the body can truly be called foods, and that 
these are the only substances that should be 




TkEACHEkOUS COMPANIONS. 


2i i> 


taken regularly into the system, we have a guide 
in our choice of visitors to our bodily house, and 
if we are truly wise, we will refuse admission to 
those whom we do not know to be builders. We 
could very well put up with the tearing down of 
our dwellings by carpenters who were preparing 
to rebuild it, but we would have little patience 
with a troop of boisterous invaders who would 
tie us fast while they destroyed our most pre¬ 
cious possessions. We should be equally impa¬ 
tient with such false friends as we have described 
in this chapter, and utterly refuse their admis¬ 
sion to our bodily dwelling. 



CHAPTER V. 


A DECEITFUL FRIEND. 


MERICA has the responsibility of introduc- 



ii ing to the world one who has become an 
intimate companion of both the high and the 
lowly. Tobacco has held his place in spite of 
his objectionable appearance, and in spite of the 
fact that his first introduction into the body is 
usually accompanied by serious upturnings. He 
is so universally disagreeable to every member of 
the household that all unite in a desperate effort 
to get rid of him ; an effort so terrible, in truth, 
that during the struggle the whole contents of 
the kitchen may be emptied out of the front 
door, all the guardians and servants be greatly 
disturbed in their duties, and work in most parts 
of the house be temporarily suspended. This 
most unpleasant visitor has a dark complexion, 
and carries with him an evil odor that ought to 
forbid his admission into any respectable house¬ 
hold. He comes of a low family. The deadly 
Nightshade, the Horse Nettle, Jamestown Weed, 
and Henbane are near relatives of his ; but, like 


[ 220] 


A DECEITFUL EE IE.YD. 


221 


some other bad folks, he has some relatives who 
are beautiful, such as the Night-blooming Jas¬ 
mine ; or useful, as the Potato and Tomato who 
are his second cousins. 

Are you now willing to learn what Science 
says of Tobacco ? We feel obliged to accept the 
statements of Science, for they are records of 
facts, and are not in the interest of any theories 
of reform. Scientists study the body and set 
down just what they find, letting it prove or dis¬ 
prove what it may, and they have been inter¬ 
ested in investigating the effects of Tobacco in 
the various disguises in which he enters the 
house. 

Sometimes he comes dressed in white and 
looks very dainty, and in this form is called a 
cigarette, and to many he appears as if quite 
harmless. Little boys are often most anxious to 
make his acquaintance, and sometimes become 
so fond of him that they say they cannot give up 
their friendship with him. Yet even in this 
charming guise he is black at heart and does 
most destructive work in the house. He often 
brings with him the false friend Opium, and fre¬ 
quently the white paper in which he is wrapped 
is bleached with arsenic. Tobacco always car¬ 
ries with him a deadly poison known as nicotin 
which is found as an oil, and it is said that this 



222 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


oil is seven per cent of the whole weight of the 
tobacco leaf. And what does nicotin do ? 
“ Nicotin primarily lowers the circulation, 
quickens the respiration, and excites the mus¬ 
cular system, but its ultimate effect is general 
exhaustion. Administered in the minutest doses, 
the results are alarming, and in larger quantities 
will occasion a man’s death in from two to five 
minutes.” This, of course, means the pure 
nicotin separated from the other substances in 
the tobacco. Well, I, for one, do not want any¬ 
thing to do with a visitor who steals into my 
house to do such harm as that, do you ? 

Franklin found that if tobacco smoke were 
passed through a stream of water, oil would ap¬ 
pear on the surface, and that oil applied to the 
tongue of a cat would kill it, for that oil was 
nicotin. You wouldn’t drink water through 
which tobacco smoke had passed, you say. Of 
course not, but you often have to breathe air 
that is filled with it, for the nicotin goes off 
with the smoke, and not only the smoker, but 
everybody around him suffers. 

Tobacco sometimes comes as a visitor to the 
bodily dwelling in a brown dress as a cigar; 
or he may be carried in a conveyance called a 
pipe, and some men spend more time and take 
more pride in coloring a meerschaum pipe by 




A DECEITFUL FRIEND. 


223 


tobacco smoke, than they do in gaining a pro¬ 
fession, so we see what a noble ambition it 
stimulates. Occasionally we find a person who 
takes Tobacco into closer companionship, and 
invites him into the reception room, rolls him 
over in familiar association with his tongue, 
presses him between his teeth, and then casts 
him out. This chewing is the most disgusting 
form of friendship with Tobacco, and is particu¬ 
larly hurtful in that it puts a great deal of un¬ 
necessary labor on the salivary glands, and then 
throws the result of their labor away. The 
man will not swallow the tobacco poisoned saliva 
but keeps constantly spitting, and this wastes a 
valuable digestive fluid. 

Snuff-taking used to be quite fashionable. In 
this habit, tobacco in the form of a fine powder 
is taken into the nose. Very few people snuff 
now-a-days, yet in the South we find it used by 
women who dip a stick into the snuff and then 
chew it. Some people claim that tobacco is 
good for the teeth, but the testimony of many 
dentists is to the effect that while it may deaden 
pain, it hastens decay. 

Although Tobacco is not allowed to penetrate 
farther than the reception room, his poisonous 
influences are felt all through the house. His 
first influence will be on the lips, tongue, and 



224 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


throat, and serious irritations or even cancers 
may follow. The cancer of Senator Hill is said 
to have been the result of smoking, and it is the 
general belief of physicians that the frightful 
throat difficulties of General Grant and the 
Emperor Frederick were in a great degree the 
result of smoking. Doctors who have had 
the opportunity of observation easily recognize 
the smoker’s sore throat. 

All users of tobacco will recall their first ex¬ 
perience and admit that it has a serious effect 
upon the stomach. 

Tobacco smoke necessarily irritates the bron¬ 
chial tubes and lungs, which were made to deal 
with pure air, and not with that poisoned with 
nicotin, and serious lung affections are caused 
or greatly increased by smoking. One of the 
famous Delmonico brothers of New York used 
to smoke a hundred cigars a day, and died from 
a morbid enlargement of lung cells that caused 
fits of coughing that nearly strangled him. 

The effect of nicotin on the blood is to make 
it watery and change the red corpuscles so that 
they rapidly go to pieces, and the ratio of degen¬ 
erated corpuscles may go as high as one to ten 
healthy ones. This condition of the blood is 
shown by the microscope. A man who had 
been selecting a microscope, left on the slide a 



A DECEITFUL FRIEND. 


225 


drop of his own blood which he had used as a 
test. A professor of microscopy saw the slide 
and said to the dealer: “Tell that gentleman, 
if you can without impertinence, that unless he 
stops smoking at once he has not many months 
to live.” A few weeks later he died, and the 
doctors called his disease a ‘ ‘ general breaking- 
up.” A Cincinnati paper tells us that at one time 
the sister-in-law of General Sherman was ill and 
it was thought that transfusion of blood might 
save her life. Blood was therefore conveyed to 
her arm from that of her son, an apparently vig¬ 
orous young man, but a great smoker. In a few 
moments she exclaimed, “ Who is smoking ? I 
taste tobacco.” No one was smoking, but the 
small amount of blood drawn from the veins of 
the young man was so saturated with tobacco 
that it had been recognized by her sense of taste. 
She died shortly after with heart failure. This 
gives an idea of the effects of tobacco in poison¬ 
ing the blood, and explains how it interferes 
with the growth of the young. Children grow 
only by having good blood carried to all parts 
of the body. If one tenth of the blood is made 
of broken-down blood cells, it cannot build up 
strong nerves, muscles, and bone, and so the 
smoking boy may not grow to full size. This 
lack of growth does not result alone from a poor 
*5 



226 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


quality of blood, but from the debility and ir¬ 
regularity of the heart’s action, caused by the 
nicotin. Brodie says: “It powerfully affects 
the action of the heart and arteries, producing 
invariably a weak, tremulous pulse, with all the 
apparent symptoms of approaching death.” 

Another physician says: “ If we wish at any 
time to prostrate the powers of life in the most 
sudden and awful manner, we have but to ad¬ 
minister a dose of tobacco and our object is ac¬ 
complished. The effect on the heart is not caused 
by direct action, but by paralyzing the minute ves¬ 
sels which form the batteries of the nervous 
system. The heart, freed from their control, 
increases the rapidity of its strokes, with an ap¬ 
parent accession, but real waste, of force.” 

Under its influence the heart beats more rap¬ 
idly, but not with the same force, so it does not 
send a constant stream of blood to all the organs, 
while at the same time it is exhausted by its own 
increased labors. If we go back and read the 
chapter on the Force Pump, and see that the 
heart must get its rest between beats, and then 
are told that one doctor who counted his pulse 
every five minutes during an hour’s smoking cal¬ 
culated that it beat a thousand times too often, 
we can begin to realize the danger to the heart 



A DECEITFUL FRIEND. 


227 


in the use of tobacco, and will not be surprised 
to learn that “ the tobacco heart,” as it is called, 
is on the increase, and many young men are 
finding untimely graves through making a friend 
of tobacco. 

Dr. Magruder, medical examiner of the U. S. 
Navy, says that one out of every one hundred 
applicants for enlistment is rejected because of 
irritable heart from the use of tobacco. Major 
Houston, of our naval schools, asserts that one 
fifth of the boys who apply for admission are re¬ 
jected on account of heart disease, and that 
ninety per cent of those thus rejected have in¬ 
duced the heart disease in themselves by the 
use of tobacco. 

The deteriorated blood caused by its use has 
its effect upon the nutrition of all structures, but 
it has also a direct effect on the nerves, paralyz¬ 
ing* those of sensation and of volition. Dr. 
Newell, of Boston, says, “Tobacco has eleven 
special centers of action in the human system, 
the chief of which are the heart, eyes, spinal 
cord, genitalia, lungs, and the circulation. I 
have seen nicotin lower the circulation and les¬ 
sen the respiratory power, wither and paralyze 
the motor column of the spinal cord, produce 
atrophy and blindness. It produces mental 




228 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


aberration, low spirits, irresolution, the most 
dismal hypochondria, insomnia, and sometimes, 
after the victim has retired, frightful shocks, like 
a discharge of electricity. ” What do you think 
of such a friend as that ? 

Do you know that athletes, oarsmen, and pu¬ 
gilists are not allowed to use tobacco, and can 
you guess why ? It is because they have learned 
that they cannot do their best work when they 
smoke. Mr. O’ Flaherty says : “I have known 
men who, previous to their using tobacco, could 
send a bullet through a target at eight hundred 
yards, but after they became smokers were so 
nervous that they could scarcely send one into 
a hay-stack at a hundred yards. ” The hand of 
the smoker often trembles so that he cannot 
draw a clean, straight line, and it is said that 
applicants for the situation of bookkeeper have 
been rejected because of their tremulous hand¬ 
writing. Our base-ball players are learning that 
the man who uses tobacco may have a defective 
eyesight which lessens his ability as a batter. 
The use of tobacco causes a dilatation of the 
pupils of the eye and confusion of vision. They 
find too frequently that when they shut their 
eyes the images remain visible a long time be¬ 
cause of the impaired activity of the nerves of 
the retina. A peculiar kind of blindness is at- 



A DECEITFUL FRIEND. 


229 


tributable to the use of tobacco, which will not 
be relieved by any remedies as long as the habit 
of smoking is continued. 

One doctor says that tobacco produces a con¬ 
traction of the blood vessels which causes anae¬ 
mia of the nerve structure, and this, of course, 
weakens the nerves and causes them to degen¬ 
erate. The ear is also affected by the use of 
tobacco. Sometimes there is an inability to 
hear clearly, and sometimes there are roaring 
sounds in the ears. In other cases there will be 
chronic catarrh and inflammation of the middle 
ear, extending down the Eustachian tube into 
the throat. Actors and singers are learning by 
experience that the use of tobacco injures the 
voice, rendering it coarse, tremulous, and husky. 

The effect upon the brain and nerves is very 
marked. A member of the Paris Academy of 
Medicine says that statistics show that in exact 
proportion to the increased consumption of 
tobacco, is the increase of diseases in the nerv¬ 
ous centers, insanity, general paralysis, paraple¬ 
gia, and certain cancerous affections. 

The Superintendent of the Pennsylvania In¬ 
sane Hospital says : 4 4 The earlier boys begin to 
use tobacco, the more strongly marked are its 
effects upon the nerves and brain.” Professor 
Kirke says: “You see a man weary, and yet 



230 


OCR BODILY DWELLING. 


restless. By means of the narcotic this nervous 
irritation is subdued. The supply of vital force 
from the organic centers to the motor nerve is 
so much lessened that the irritating movement 
in them ceases. This gives a sense of relief to 
the person affected. He is not aware that the 
benefit is purchased at a very serious cost. 
He has not only lessened the supply of vital 
force for the time being, but has done a very 
considerable amount of injury to his vital sys¬ 
tem. He has, in fact, poisoned the springs of 
life within him. As soon as these nerves rally 
from the lowering effect of the narcotic, the irri¬ 
tation returns, and the narcotic is called for 
anew. Fresh injury is inflicted for the sake of 
the ease desired. This goes on till the vital cen¬ 
ters, if at all delicate, totally fail to give supply tjo 
the motor nerves, and paralysis begins. Yet the 
man goes on indulging in the so-called luxury of 
the narcotic.” 

Physicians are even beginning to ascribe delir¬ 
ium tremens to the exasperating agency of to¬ 
bacco upon the human nerves and organism, but 
the evil effects of tobacco are not confined to 
the phyiscal powers but are also felt in the intel¬ 
lectual capacity. Presidents of colleges, superin¬ 
tendents of schools, educators everywhere are 
giving their unqualified testimony upon this point. 



A DECEITFUL FRIEND. 


231 


In 1863 the Emperor Louis Napoleon, learning 
that paralysis and insanity had increased with 
the increase of tobacco revenue, ordered an 
examination of schools and colleges, and this 
brought to light the fact that the average stand¬ 
ing both as to scholarship and character, was 
lower among the users of tobacco than among 
the non-users, and he therefore issued an edict 
forbidding its use in all the national institutions. 

French medical scientific men made very 
thorough investigation in regard to the effects of 
tobacco in the public schools of France, extend¬ 
ing from 1876 to 1880, and the result was that 
the minister of Public Instruction issued a circu¬ 
lar to teachers in all schools of every grade for¬ 
bidding tobacco, as injurious not only to the 
physical, but to the intellectual development. 

I heard a president of a Normal College say to 
his students that he could pick out the users of 
tobacco by simply looking at the record of reci¬ 
tations, and added : “If there is one boy who 
can use tobacco and keep up with his classes, 
that boy has an intellect bright enough to yield 
him a world-wide reputation if he were to give 
up the use of tobacco. ” The Yale Cour ant tells 
us that in the four grades of scholarship into 
which Yale students are divided, in the first 
grade, only twenty-five per cent use tobacco; in 



232 


OUR BODILY DWELLING . 


the second grade, forty-eight per cent; in the 
third, seventy per cent; and in the lowest, 
eighty-five per cent. A report by the medical 
department of the U. S. Naval Academy at Ann¬ 
apolis, Maryland, enumerates as the results of 
the use of tobacco in the school : “ Functional 

derangements of the digestive, circulatory, and 
nervous systems, manifesting themselves in the 
form of headache, confusion of intellect, loss of 
memory, impaired power of attention, lassitude, 
indisposition to muscular effort, nausea, want of 
appetite, dyspepsia, palpitation, tremulousness, 
disturbed sleep, impaired vision, etc., any one of 
which materially lessens the capacity for study 
and application. The Board are of opinion, 
therefore, that the regulations against the use of 
tobacco in any form cannot be too stringent.” 
What an array of charges to bring against one 
who claims to be a friend! 

Worse, perhaps, than all this terrible effect on 
the body and mind, is the evil result to the 
moral nature. According to a New York doctor, 
“the universal experience of all mankind will 
attest, and the intelligent observation of any 
individual will confirm the statement that, 
precisely in t£ie ratio that persons indulge in 
narcotic stimulants, the mental powers are 
unbalanced, the lower propensities acquire undue 



' A DECEITFUL FRIEND. 


233 


and inordinate activity at the expense, not only 
of vital stamina, but also of the moral and intel¬ 
lectual nature. The whole being is not only 
perverted, but introverted and retroverted. To¬ 
bacco using, even more than liquor drinking, 
disqualifies the mind for exercising its intuitions 
concerning the right and wrong ; it degrades the 
moral sense below the intellectual recognitions.” 

The testimony of Professor Stuart, of Andover, 
is that tobacco undermines the health of thou¬ 
sands, creates a nervous irritability, and thus 
operates on the temper and moral character of 
men. It is the opinion of Professor Mead, of 
Oberlin, that the tobacco habit tends to deaden 
the sense of honor as well as of decency, and 
none are likely to practice deception more un¬ 
scrupulously than those who use the weed. 

Dr. Harris says, “There is no article of luxury 
that so secretly, and yet so surely saps all the 
foundations of manliness and virtue as the use of 
tobacco. It paves the way to every vice, and 
tends directly to habits of the grossest immo¬ 
rality. 

We can only account for the enslavement of 
moral teachers to the habit of smoking, on the 
ground that these men began the habit years 
ago when the true character of tobacco was not 
as well known as to-day, and now, blinded by 



234 OUR BODILY DWELLING. 

its seductiveness, they will not be convinced that 
it has harmed them. I think one of the saddest 
sights I ever saw was that of two doctors of 
divinity smoking together, one fast falling into 
imbecility with softening of the brain, and the 
other totally blind. The profession of piety 
does not save one from the penalty of violated 
law, and it is written, ‘ ‘ Whoso defileth the tem¬ 
ple of God, him shall God destroy, for the tem¬ 
ple of God is holy, which temple ye are. ” 

In a discourse to the graduating class at Will¬ 
iams College, President Hopkins, after some 
preliminary remarks on the use of tobacco, thus 
sums up : “I may express to you my conviction 
that habitual narcotic stimulation of the brain 
is not compatible with the fullest consecration of 
the body as a temple of God. Good men may 
do this in ignorance, as other things prevalent at 
times have been done, and not offend their con¬ 
sciences ; but I believe that greater earnestness, 
more self-scrutiny, fuller light, would reveal its 
incompatibility with full consecration, and sweep 
it entirely away. The present position, on this 
point, of the Christian Church as a whole, and 
largely of the Christian ministry, I regard as ob¬ 
structive of the highest manhood and of the 
spread of spiritual religion. I know that strong 
men have in this connection been bound as in 



A DECEITFUL FRIEND. 


235 


fetters of brass, and cast down from high places, 
and have found premature prostration and a 
premature grave, and that this process is now 
going on. Let me say, therefore, to those of 
you who expect to be ministers, that I believe 
sermons, even those called great sermons, which 
are the product of alcoholic or narcotic stimula¬ 
tion, are a service of God by ‘ strange-fire ; ’ and 
that for men to be scrupulous about their attire 
as clerical, and yet to enter upon religious serv¬ 
ices with narcotized bodies and a breath that 
‘ smells to heaven ’ of anything but incense, is 
an incongruity and an offense, a cropping out of 
the old pharisaism that made clean ‘ the outside 
of the cup and platter.’ Not that abstinence 
has a merit, or secures consecration ; it is only 
its best condition.” 

It is claimed by many that the use of tobacco 
leads to strong drink. To be sure, many 
smokers do not drink, but I imagine there are 
few drinkers who do not smoke, and the testi¬ 
mony of men endeavoring to reform is that to 
succeed they must not only give up their drink 
but their tobacco. 

Alcohol is often used in the process of curing 
the tobacco leaf, so, in addition to the poison of 
nicotin, the user of tobacco may also take in 
some alcohol with it. Jerry Me Auley, well 



236 


OUR BODILY DWELLING . 


known for his mission in Water Street, New 
York, said that it is rare to find a reformed man 
who does not return to his cups, if he continues 
the use of tobacco, and the effort is made in his 
mission to induce men not only to give up drink, 
but the use of the weed as well. The fetters 
which tobacco binds around his victims are as 
strong as those of opium or alcohol. 

I once talked with a boy of seventeen, who 
said he could have a good farm given to him if 
he would quit smoking. ‘ ‘ I want the farm, ” he 
said, “and I have tried to quit, but I cannot.” 
I have even heard of a boy of six so enslaved by 
the tobacco habit that he preferred a cigarette 
to candy. 

I find in the book, “Tobacco Problem,” this 
little story: A man found himself out of flour, 
meat, and tobacco. Having in his purse only a 
dollar and seventy-five cents, he went to market 
and came home with fifty cents’ worth of meat, 
and the dollar and twenty-five cents’ worth of 
tobacco, telling his wife that they must trust the 
Lord for flour. If grown men are such slaves, 
would it not be wise for boys to keep out of 
such bondage ? I wish they could be induced 
to say that they were free, but alas ! all over 
our land boys are beginning to put themselves 
into the power of this tyrant. 



A DECEITFUL FRIEND. 


237 


The Boston Journal , in the year 1882, says, 

‘ ‘ Seventy-five per cent of school boys over 
twelve or thirteen years of age, smoke cigar¬ 
ettes.” We are glad to learn that Professor 
William Stephenson, Philadelphia, has caused 
to be pasted in the inside of every text-book used 
in his school, a brief, printed statement of the 
physical and mental diseases produced in the 
young by the use of tobacco. It needs backbone 
to give up the habit of tobacco using, and many 
people are afraid to quit suddenly for fear the re¬ 
sults will be serious, but we have the testimony of 
medical men to the fact that, while it may be 
exceedingly uncomfortable, it is perfectly safe to 
quit immediately. 

Dr. Kirkebride says, ‘ ‘ I have never seen the 
slightest injury result from the immediate and 
total breaking off the habit of using tobacco, 
and the experience of this hospital is a large 
one in this particular.” We quote, from the 
testimony of another physician: “The struggle 
of the sufferer may be terrible, he may even feel 
like death, but there is no danger of dying. 
Such a result has never yet happened. Al¬ 
though the pain and misery are intense, their 
duration is short.” 

To one endeavoring to break free from the 
fetters of tobacco using, it might be well to sug- 



238 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


gest that a great assistance will be found in 
avoiding all stimulating, highly seasoned articles 
of food, and in the using of fruits, especially lem¬ 
ons, also in warm bathing, or wet sheet packing, 
to induce the speedy elimination of the poison 
from the skin. 

I have written as if all the victims, of the to¬ 
bacco habit were men and boys, but I am told 
that girls are often induced to smoke cigarettes 
just for fun, and end by becoming constant users 
of tobacco. I know of one bright girl of seven¬ 
teen who smokes so much that she carries with 
her the same odor of person as a tobacco- 
saturated man. What a frightful thing for a 
pretty girl to poison the air all about her with 
the odor of tobacco, and yet it is no worse for 
girls to smoke than for boys, and we who have 
come to have a regard for the bodily house in 
which we dwell in company with the divine 
Architect who created it, will certainly banish 
tobacco from our premises. 

The Bible says, “When a man would build a 
house, he first sits down and counts the cost.” 
It is well also to count the cost of bringing into 
our wonderful house agencies which will tear it 
down. We have been counting the cost of 
the use of tobacco in its effect upon nerves 
and blood, on heart and brain, on memory, in- 




A DECEITFUL FRIEND. 


230 


tellect, and morals ; now suppose we count the 
cost in dollars and cents. You can figure up for 
yourself what would be the yearly expense of a 
man who smoked a hundred cigars a day, as 
Delmonico is said to have done. If they cost 
only five cents apiece, it would amount to five 
dollars a day, or eighteen hundred dollars a 
year. 

A man is considered a very moderate smoker 
who uses only three cigars a day ; computing 
these at five cents each, would make over fifty 
dollars a year. But suppose he only spends 
five cents a day, will you figure up what he 
could save if he put it out at compound inter¬ 
est ? Or suppose he put the fifty dollars into 
books, at the end of a year he would not have 
paralyzed his nerves and poisoned his blood, and 
have only an empty pocket-book ; he would have 
gathered about him a company of choice friends 
to be a pleasure to him all through life. 

Let me quote again from “The Tobacco 
Problem “ Some years since, the annual pro¬ 
duction of tobacco throughout the world was 
estimated at four billion pounds. This mass, 
if transformed into roll-tobacco two inches in 
diameter, would coil around the world sixty 
times ; or, if made up into tablets, as sailors use 
it, would form a pile as high as an Egyptian 



240 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


pyramid. Allowing the cost of the unmanufact¬ 
ured material to be ten cents a pound, the 
yearly expense of this poisonous growth amounts 
to four hundred million dollars. Put into mar¬ 
ketable shape, the annual cost reaches one thou¬ 
sand million dollars. This sum, according to 
careful computation, would construct two rail¬ 
roads round the earth at twenty thousand dollars 
a mile. It would build a hundred thousand 
churches, each costing ten thousand dollars, or 
half a million school-houses, each costing two 
thousand; or it would employ a million of 
preachers and a million teachers, at a salary of 
five hundred dollars.” 

It is estimated by a computation from internal 
revenue tax paid in the fourth district of Michi¬ 
gan, that the consumers of tobacco in that dis¬ 
trict, in one year paid out ten times the amount 
it costs per annum to support the University of 
Michigan and its students. 

The late President Wayland says: “The 
American Board, an institution of world-wide 
benevolence, which collects its funds from all the 
Northern States, does not receive annually as 
much as is expended for cigars in the single State 
of New York. But this is not the only expense 
of tobacco using. Great fires often result from 
the carelessness of smokers. A plumber threw 



A DECEITFUL FRIEND . 


241 


down a lighted match in the printing establish¬ 
ment of Harper Brothers ; a fire resulted with a 
loss of two million dollars, and about two thou¬ 
sand people were thrown out of employment. 
A fire which destroyed three million dollars’ 
worth of property resulted from the throwing 
away of a half-smoked cigar. A young woman 
was riding with a young man who was smoking ; 
a spark from his cigar set fire to her light muslin 
dress, and she was burned to death. 

The destructive effects of tobacco-raising on 
the soil, must be included in this count of cost; 
also its effects upon the condition and character 
of those raising it. Jefferson says, “It is a 
culture productive of infinite wretchedness. 
No other crop so entirely exhausts the soil, and 
this must be recognized by those who travel 
through the old tobacco-growing districts.” Close 
observers declare that the cultivation of tobacco 
tends to blunt the moral and religious sensibili¬ 
ties, impairs the spiritual perception, and results 
in many cases in spiritual death. If tobacco 
lessens courage, decreases will power, diminishes 
mental force, and deteriorates bodily vigor, its 
constant use, as in our country, cannot fail to be 
manifest in the characteristics of the nation. 

Extract from the Quarterly Journal of Science , 
1873: “Homer sang his death song, Raphael 
16 



242 


OUR BODILY DWELLING . 


painted his glorious Madonnas, Luther preached, 
Guttenburg printed, Columbus discovered a New 
World before tobacco was heard of. No rations 
of tobacco were served out to the heroes of 
Thermopylae, no cigar strung up the nerves of 
Socrates. Empires rose and fell, men lived and 
loved and died during long ages without tobacco. 
History was for the most part written before its 
appearance. ‘ It is the solace, the aider, the 
familiar spirit of the thinker,’ cries the apolo¬ 
gist ; yet Plato, the divine, thought without its 
aid, Augustine described the glories of God’s city, 
Dante sang his majestic melancholy song, Sa¬ 
vonarola reasoned and died ; Alfred ruled wisely 
without it. Tyrateus sang his patriotic song, 
Roger Bacon dived deep into nature’s secrets, 
the wise Stagirite sounded the depths of human 
wisdom, equally unaided by it. Harmodius and 
Aristogeiton twined the myrtle round their 
swords, and slew the tyrant of their father-land, 
without its inspiration. In a few words, kings 
ruled, poets sang, artists painted, patriots bled, 
martyrs suffered, thinkers reasoned, before it 
was known or dreamed of.” 




CHAPTER VI. 


THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 

I ONCE invited a lady to visit me in my new 
house which had been built after my own 
plan, and was very dear to me. She brought 
with her a little son of five years, and he had a 
most enjoyable time even if I did not. He 
made pictures on the windows with moist fingers, 
he swung from the door knobs, kicking the paint 
with his heels ; he drew pictures on the dainty 
paper with a pencil ; and, finally, lay down on 
the floor and pounded with his heels on the wall, 
to enjoy the noise, I suppose. I had quietly 
submitted to the soiling of windows and paper, 
but I could not sit still and see the plastering 
broken, and so gently remonstrated. The 
mother, who had been a most placid witness of 
her darling’s devastations, now felt it necessary 
to utter a mild remonstrance. “O my dear, 
you mustn’t play that way in the house.” The 
young hopeful gave another tattoo with his heels, 
saying, 4 ‘ What are houses made for then ? ” 
When I have seen the evident delight taken 
by people in the wilful destruction of their 

t 2 43 ] 


244 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


bodies,, I have thought that, like this child, they 
imagined their bodily houses were made to de¬ 
stroy. 

There is one guest who is as destructive, 
though not as frank a visitor as this child. Like 
the other false friends whom we have described, 
he claims to build up while in reality he is only 
pulling down. He poses as a royal individual 
under the title of King Alcohol, and many of his 
subjects do him loyal homage. Although claim¬ 
ing the title of royalty, he proffers invaluable 
service. He says, “Admit me to your house 
and I will add to its powers and increase your 
happiness. I will give you added digestive force, 
and increase your mental ability and muscular 
vigor; I will enable you to endure cold, hunger, 
and hardships ; I will cure your diseases, quiet 
your pains, and comfort you in your sorrow.” 
No wonder that with such promises he was be¬ 
lieved to be a veritable savior from manifold ills, 
and, as such, was received in the palaces of the 
rich and the cottages of the poor with a right 
royal welcome. 

And how has he kept his promises ? For a 
long time it was supposed that he actually did 
all that was claimed for him ; songs were sung 
in his praise, and in homes and hospitals, in 
health and disease, accidents and emergencies, 



THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 


24o 


he was thought to be the one unfailing reliance. 

Before we study his deeds, let us learn a little 
of his personality. The forms under which he 
asks admission to the bodily house are many. 
Sometimes he comes as a right jolly, common¬ 
place fellow called Beer, who hobnobs with 
those whose purse is slim and whose tastes are 
for ordinary pleasures. Sometimes as Cider he 
claims to be the companion of rustic enjoy¬ 
ments. To the more refined and fastidious he 
presents himself as bright, sparkling Wine, that 
claims only to exhilarate and enhance the joys 
of life. Sometimes in guise of Brandy, Whisky, 
Gin, and the like, he makes a sharp appeal to 
the senses, and more quickly deadens the sensa¬ 
tion of discomfort. 

Science, in her investigation, has learned that 
decomposition is taking place constantly; that 
substances are changing their forms, but that in 
all the change nothing is lost. All organized 
substances undergo the form of decomposition 
called decay, and the decay of the same sub¬ 
stance under different circumstances gives rise 
to different products. Nitrogenous compounds 
decay very readily. Pure starch and sugar 
will keep a long time, but brought into con¬ 
tact with nitrogenous products in the process 
of decay, they take on the same condition. 



246 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


We know that one decayed apple in a basket 
will very soon spoil all the rest, and we are not 
very fond of rotten fruit. This process of decay 
produces what is known as fermentation, where 
the atoms that have united to form the sub¬ 
stances are returned to their original elements 
of carbonic acid and water. They are putrefy¬ 
ing, and every putrefying substance becomes a 
ferment, and can start fermentation in other 
substances. 

It is now conceded by scientists that in all 
these processes of decay, living organisms are 
present. Yeast is produced by fermentation of 
starch, and is found to consist of a live fungus. 
In the production of alcohol there must be five 
things : First, sugar; second, water; third, heat; 
fourth, a ferment ; and fifth, atmospheric air. 
The juices of vegetables and fruits contain 
sugar and water; these exposed to the air in a 
warm place ferment and produce alcohol. 

All grains have a great deal of starch which 
can be changed into sugar. In the sprouting of 
all seeds a peculiar ferment called diastase is 
produced. When grain that has sprouted is 
killed by hot water and allowed to stand a short 
time, this ferment increases and thus produces 
what is known as malt, which added to another 
grain and kept moist and warm, will change its 



THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 


247 


starch into sugar, and then the fermentation 
takes place which produces alcohol. 

You see that in order for alcohol to exist, the 
sweet, nourishing grain must die and rot, and all 
its health-giving properties be destroyed. Beer 
is made from fermentation of barley ; wine is the 
fermented juice of grapes or other fruits; hard- 
cider is the fermented juice of apples. By the 
action of heat, alcohol is driven off from these 
fermented liquors, and this is called distillation. 
In the process some water goes off with the 
alcohol and thus is formed various strong liq¬ 
uors, such as brandy or whisky, which are 
one half alcohol. Some wines are one fourth 
alcohol, others not more than one twentieth; 
cider is, perhaps, one fifteenth. 

We see that in the formation of alcohol, there 
is always a destruction of sugar. It never arises 
from growth, but always from decay, and decay 
assisted by an artificial process. As Count Chap- 
tal says, “ Nature never forms spirituous liquors ; 
she ripens the grape upon the branch, but it is 
art which converts the juice into wines.” Har- 
greave’s book, “Alcohol and Science,” says: 
“No chemist has ever yet found alcohol among 
the substances formed by plants. Nature in the 
laboratory of vegetation, takes the poisonous 
gases and splits them up, and then puts the 



248 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


atoms into new groups capable of nourishing the 
animal system. But alcohol is a product of dis¬ 
solution, the wreck, the disorganization of human 
food ; it is, in reality, a product of decomposi¬ 
tion. The juices of the fruits, by the influence 
of that fungus yeast, are turned into rottenness, 
and then, and then only, is alcohol generated 
out of the destruction of the organic sugar. It 
has the same origin as the malignant and fatal ex¬ 
halations of pestilence, the putrefaction of organic 
substances. Hence it is no more the gift of the 
Creator than is the malarial poison that breathes 
its contagion and strikes down the young and old 
with disease and death.” 

To continue life in the body, we must take 
into it the products of life, not of putrefaction. 
Alcohol contributes no substances that form 
tissue, and when eliminated from the excretory 
organs it is still alcohol. It is thrown out through 
the pores of the skin, through the lungs and the 
kidneys and always unchanged in form. Dr. 
James Kirke, of Scotland, says that in the case 
of a man who died in a state of intoxication, the 
fluid found in the brain smelled of alcohol, and 
actually burned with the same blue flame charac¬ 
teristic of this poison. Dr. Ogsden of Aberdeen, 
examined the body of a woman who died while 
intoxicated, and found in the heart nearly four 




THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 


249 


ounces of fluid having all the qualities of alcohol. 
Dr. Percy, of Nottingham, England, was not 
willing to rely upon the odor, or inflammability 
of fluids after death, but by distillation he pro¬ 
duced from these fluids that which, when treated 
chemically, proved to be alcoholic. He had no 
difficulty in extracting alcohol from the blood, 
from the substances of the brain, from the liver 
and the bile. It must not be supposed, however, 
that Alcohol leaves the body just as he found it. 
Everywhere he goes he leaves traces of his de¬ 
structiveness. In the first place, he is a thief of 
water, and begins his robbery as soon as he enters 
the house! He takes water away from the mu¬ 
cous membrane of the mouth, giving a puckered 
feeling, more or less severe, according to the 
dilution of the alcohol. This abstraction of 
water takes place throughout the body wherever 
Alcohol goes. 

You will remember that the blood slips through 
the walls of the capillaries into the tissues, and 
waste material in the same way passes from the 
tissues into the blood, arid by this process of 
osmosis the body is nourished and kept in repair. 
Alcohol makes these membranes stiff and hard 
so that the blood cannot readily pass through 
them. People sometimes say that they get fat 
drinking beer or wine. In truth they are filled 



250 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


up with waste matter that cannot slip through 
the stiffened membranes into the blood to be 
carried out of the body, and that certainly is not 
a very desirable state of affairs. If people are 
dying every day in the house, we know that they 
must be taken away or their presence will create 
disease. If our bodily servants, the cells, which 
are constantly dying, cannot be carried away, 
they are like an accumulation of corpses in the 
house. They may fill up all the spaces and 
stretch the body to its utmost, but they are dead 
and their presence must provoke disease. If the 
tissues cannot obtain proper food, they degenerate 
and become fatty, and they cannot get food if 
the membranes are hardened by alcohol ; so that 
people may get fat while taking alcoholic bever¬ 
ages through this fatty degeneration. 

Alcohol tends to produce fat also by consum¬ 
ing the oxygen which should have been used in 
oxidizing fat. We are told that two ounces of 
alcohol taken in twenty-four hours will not be 
eliminated, but will disappear somewhere in the 
body, and some claim that this proves it to be a 
food; while others claim with equal positiveness 
that its retention in the body is productive of 
evil, by interfering with the processes of nutri¬ 
tion. Upon this point N. S. Davis, M. D., says, 
“The individual who increases his weight and 



THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 


251 


bulk by taking just enough of the weaker alco¬ 
holic drinks to retard the process of secretion and 
waste, in the same proportion diminishes his 
activity, his power of endurance, and his ability 
to resist the effects of morbid agents of every 
kind.” 

Sometimes alcohol has the effect of making 
the membranes full of holes so that they let the 
nourishment of the blood leak out of the body 
through the excretory organs. In this way the 
kidneys may carry away the building-up material, 
leaving the body to fall into ruin, not because 
food is not taken, but because, by the action of 
alcohol, food is lost. The form of kidney difficulty 
known as Bright’s disease is of this character. 

Everywhere through the house alcohol goes 
with the blood into all the minute capillaries. 
And what does it do to the blood ? It may cause 
the little red corpuscles to cling together in clots, 
and these clots may lodge somewhere in the 
blood vessels, stopping the circulation through 
that part and causing it to die ; or they may go 
to the lungs and stop the circulation there ; or 
to the heart and prevent its action ; or to the 
brain and produce apoplexy. Alcohol changes 
the shape of the red corpuscles, interferes with 
their power to slip through the blood vessels and 
to carry oxygen to all parts of the body. 



252 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


But alcohol helps digestion, you say. What 
is the report of science on this point ? Dr. 
Beaumont again gives us valuable information. 
He observed that whenever St. Martin drank any 
alcoholic beverage, whether it was beer, wine, or 
stronger drinks, the coat of the stomach became 
inflamed, and when he had been drinking freely 
for some days there were ulcerous patches which 
increased with the amount of drink. 

People sometimes say they are sure that alco¬ 
holic drinks do not hurt them, because they are 
not conscious of any disturbing effect, but even 
when Dr. Beaumont saw these ulcerous patches 
in the stomach of St. Martin, the man himself 
had no pain. If the doctor had judged by St. 
Martin’s feelings, he would have said no harm 
was being done, but the stomach told another 
story. When liquor was abandoned, the stom¬ 
ach was gradually restored to the healthy state. 
Dr. Beaumont says, ‘ ‘ It was not ardent spirits 
alone that produced these changes, but even 
wine and beer. Nor are these changes indicated 
by any ordinary symptoms, or particular sensa¬ 
tions ; their existence was only ascertained by 
ocular demonstrations. ” 

But if a stomach, inflamed by alcohol, should 
complain, the man usually argues that it is a call 
for more drink. If he takes the drink, he feels 



THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 


253 


the gnawing lessened, and then argues that the 
drink is beneficial. The truth is that the alcohol 
deadens the sense of discomfort by a partial pa¬ 
ralysis of the nerves of sensation, and as soon as 
they have recovered from this paralysis, the feel¬ 
ing of uneasiness returns. This process repeated 
year after year may result in serious disease, 
perhaps even in cancer. 

Alcohol not only irritates the mucous mem¬ 
brane of the stomach but it precipitates the pep¬ 
sin. What does that mean ? Well, it means 
this: There is in the gastric juice an active 
substance called pepsin which has the power to 
digest food. When alcohol is taken, it causes 
this pepsin to separate from the gastric juice, to 
settle as a sediment, and to lose its active power. 
It is as if it took the knives and other culinary 
utensils out of the hands of the cook, threw 
them in a heap on the floor, and claimed that 
that was helping the cook to do his work. 

Dr. J. H. Kellogg, in his studies of the effects 
of various substances on the process of digestion, 
finds that alcohol always hinders stomach diges¬ 
tion. As it hardens the albumen in living tissue, 
so it also hardens the albuminoid substances 
which are taken as food, and so makes them 
more difficult to digest. 

When one has eaten a big dinner and feels 



254 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


uncomfortable, he may feel relieved by taking a 
drink of some alcoholic beverage, but that is 
because the nerves of sensation are deadened, 
and not because the dinner is being better di¬ 
gested. The nerves of sensation being dead¬ 
ened, keep quiet and make no further report of 
trouble, and because he hears no report, Man 
thinks matters are going on in a better way, 
which is not true. Alcohol plays the mischief 
everywhere with the nerves. He paralyzes 
those that govern the size of the blood vessels, 
and the blood rushes in and dilates the capilla¬ 
ries, and stays there. This causes the flushed 
face and red nose which, in time, become 
chronic. To insure the health of an organ, the 
blood must circulate through it, and for the 
blood to stagnate in it is just as much starvation 
to the organ as if not enough blood were called 
there. 

But again, you will say alcohol warms people 
when they are cold. It causes a feeling of heat 
on the surface, while it takes heat from the 
interior of the body. The experience of Arctic 
explorers demonstrates that alcohol diminishe's 
the power of enduring extreme cold. 

Sir John Richardson, M. D., of the English 
Arctic expedition, says: “I am quite satisfied 



THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. £55 

that spirituous liquors diminish the power of re¬ 
sistance to cold. Plenty of food and sound 
digestion are the best sources of heat.” The 
experience of twenty-six men traveling in the far 
West, well provided with food, clothing, and 
whisky, but with no means of building a fire, 
illustrates the deceptive nature of alcohol in 
keeping men warm. Their experience was se¬ 
vere, and those suffered most who drank most. 
Those that became intoxicated froze to death ; 
those that drank less lived through the night, 
but died after a time ; those that drank moder¬ 
ately survived, but will feel the effects of their 
experience as long as they live. The three men 
who survived without any serious effects, were 
the three who through the whole time never 
drank a drop. These men were all Americans 
between twenty-three and forty-one years of age ; 
all were equally provided with blankets; all 
were in good health, the only difference being in 
the amount of liquor which they used. 

Dr. N. S. Davis proved by an extensive series 
of experiments, that during the digestion of food 
the temperature of the body was increased, but 
when any alcoholic beverages were taken, the 
temperature began to fall within half an hour, 
and continued to decrease during two or three 




256 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


hours, and the reduction of the temperature in 
extent and duration was in direct proportion to 
the amount of alcohol taken. 

The drunken man is a poisoned man ; this is 
proven in various ways. He staggers because 
the nerves of motion are partly paralyzed and 
will not convey his will to his muscles. In the 
trembling limbs of the confirmed drunkard, we 
see this condition become chronic. 

The effect of alcohol upon the heart is 
marked. It interferes with its steady pumping, 
the action becomes more and more rapid, there¬ 
fore time for rest is lessened, and this wears the 
heart out faster than is necessary. Experiments 
have proven that if a man drinks only one fluid 
ounce of alcohol a day, his heart will beat four 
hundred and thirty times oftener than it does 
normally, and eight ounces will cause it to beat 
about twenty-five thousand times oftener than it 
should. Even two ounces of alcohol, evenly 
distributed throughout the day, will raise the 
number of heart beats by about six thousand. 
This increased rapidity of the heart’s action is, 
in large part, due to the effort made to get rid of 
the poison. The increased rush is partly due 
also to the paralyzing of the nerves of the capil¬ 
laries. By this means the blood rushes in 
such quantity to the surface, that it makes the 



THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 


257 


heart feel it necessary to pump more blood, and 
so it runs faster and more irregularly until per¬ 
haps it is entirely exhausted. 

The kidneys are seldom found in a healthy 
condition in a drunkard, or even in a moderate 
drinker. Dr. Christison, of Edinburgh, says 
that nearly four fifths of the cases of kidney 
diseases which he has had to deal with were in 
persons who were real drunkards, or else used 
alcoholic liquors constantly, though perhaps 
never becoming really intoxicated. 

The liver is the organ first affected by the use 
of alcohol. It becomes greatly enlarged in size 
through being loaded with fat. We have studied 
the wonderful work done in the liver and can 
readily understand that if its healthful action is 
interfered with, the whole body is more or less 
disturbed. Alcohol changes the secretion of bile 
from a bright yellow color to green, or almost 
black, and from a thin fluid to one the consist¬ 
ency of tar. It hardens the liver tissue until, as 
Hargreaves says, ‘ ‘ The liver sometimes becomes 
full of unabsorbed matter which forms in spots 
and consists of a kind of consolidated pus, such 
as is seen to form under a scab, or when an 
ulcer is opened. These little spots at first may 
not be larger than a pin-head, but as the inflam¬ 
mation increases, two or more unite to form a 
17 



258 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


larger spot, and these grow until at last the 
whole liver is changed in color. ” Poultry dealers 
sometimes mix alcohol with the food of fowls in 
order to increase the size of their livers. The 
examination of drunkards after death discloses 
horrible things concerning the effect of alcohol 
on the liver. Sometimes the substance is cov¬ 
ered with tubercles, and the blood vessels are en¬ 
tirely destroyed, showing that circulation had 
ceased even before death. Sometimes the liver 
is covered with lumps, sometimes with fungus 
growths. This increase of the size of the liver, 
together with the stretching of the stomach in 
men who drink large quantities of beer, changes 
the beautiful outlines of the body, and they 
become coarse and unsymmetrical, and yet al¬ 
though the external appearance may indicate 
unhealthful conditions, the individual may feel 
no pain. 

Dr. Trotter says of chronic disease of the 
liver that it is not painful, is slow in its progress 
and frequently gives no alarm until some incur¬ 
able affection is the consequence; so that the 
liver and stomach of the moderate drinker may 
be seriously diseased while the man imagines 
himself to be in good health. 

But we have not yet recited all the evil effects 
of alcohol. It is carried to the brain through 



THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 


259 


the circulation, and there sets up its peculiar 
poisonous action, paralyzing the nerves, and, to 
a great extent destroying the substance of the 
brain itself. We remember that the brain is of 
a jelly-like consistency, and we learn that all the 
substances of which it is composed, except its 
albuminous frame-work, are soluble in warm al¬ 
cohol ; so that the brain of the drinker becomes 
smaller and harder, and less capable of doing its 
desired work. As a result, we may have the 
production of apoplexy, epilepsy, insanity, or 
imbecility. 

Dr. Pliny Earle, of the Lunatic Hospital, 
Northampton, Mass., says, “ There are at least 
five distinct varieties of mental derangement 
which own alcoholic intemperance as their di¬ 
rect and efficient cause.”’ 

The same plea is made for alcohol as for tea 
and coffee, that it checks waste, and therefore is 
an indirect food ; but we may bring the same 
arguments to bear as used in regard to those 
articles, that the checking of normal waste is not 
desirable. If alcohol is taken into the system 
and checks waste, the products of waste are then 
retained in the body and may, in time, produce 
disease. Dr. Campbell, of Edinburgh, says, “ It 
seems to me a remarkable fallacy that physi¬ 
ologists should persist in talking of the propriety 



260 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


of sparing tissue, inasmuch as the proper func¬ 
tion of tissue is its destruction, and life the re¬ 
sultant of the change. Indeed, when any tissue 
is unduly retained in the system, it may of itself 
constitute the material of disease.” 

All the activities of life result in destruction of 
tissue, and this creates a demand for the material 
of which new tissue can be formed. This is why 
exercise makes us hungry. We should not be so 
anxious to prevent waste of tissue as we should 
be to see that all waste is duly eliminated and 
the destruction repaired by the digestion of whole¬ 
some food. 

Dr. Parkes says: “When beer is taken daily 
in excess, it produces gradually a state of ful¬ 
ness and plethora of the system, which probably 
arises from a continual, though slight, interfer¬ 
ence with elimination of both fat and nitrogenous 
tissues. When this reaches a certain point, ap¬ 
petite and the formative power of the body is 
impaired. The imperfect oxidation leads to 
excess of partially oxidized products, such as 
oxalic and uric acids. Hence many of the 
anomalous affections classed as gouty and bilious 
disorders, are evidently connected with defects in 
the retrogressive metamorphosis.” 

One of the strongest evidences that alcohol is 
a destroyer of life is found in statistics of the 



THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 


261 


mortality of intemperate people compared with 
that of temperate. 

Life insurance companies will not insure the 
lives of intemperate people, but they will insure 
moderate drinkers. The Temperance Provident 
Institution insures no one but total abstainers, 
and from the statistics of this society it seems 
that total abstinence from alcoholics reduces the 
death rates at least one half. 

Some years ago Mr. Locke, better known as 
Petroleum V. Nasby, caused the physicians of 
the city of Toledo, O., to be interviewed in re¬ 
gard to their opinion of alcohol. The universal 
statement was against its use. One physician 
had especially noticed the sudden death of men 
in the prime of life, who outwardly bore a healthy 
appearance and yet suddenly fell victims to pneu¬ 
monia, apoplexy, heart difficulty, or Bright’s 
disease, and observed that they were principally 
drinkers of beer. 

An army surgeon said it would be difficult to 
find any part of a beer drinker’s machinery that 
is doing its work as it ought. Medical men dread 
even moderate drinkers as patients. Surgeons 
learn that men who are in the habit of using 
alcoholic beverages will not easily recover from 
even slight surgical operations. 

As alcohol is supposed by many to be a specific 



262 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


remedy in cholera it might be interesting to study 
the testimony of physicians on this point. Har¬ 
greaves says, ‘‘Alcoholics tend to produce a 
condition in the system resembling cholera by 
changing the arterial blood into venous without 
the substance of the tissues having taken any 
share in the transformation.” A Warsaw physi¬ 
cian says concerning an epidemic of this disease, 

‘ ‘ Cholera, up to the present period, has respect 
for persons who lead regular lives, and has struck 
without pity every man worn-out by excess and 
weakened by dissipation.” Professor Mackintosh 
says, “ It has been computed that five sixths of 
all who have fallen by cholera in England were 
persons of intemperate habits.” 

Mr. Bronson, of Montreal, says: “The ha¬ 
bitual use of ardent spirits in the smallest quan¬ 
tity seldom fails to invite cholera and to render 
it incurable when it takes place.” Dr. Adams, 
of Glasgow, says : “I have found the use of 
alcoholic drinks to be a great pre-disposing cause 
of malignant cholera. So strong is my opinion 
on this point that had I the power I would pla¬ 
card every spirit-shop in town with these words, 
‘CHOLERA SOLD here.”’ The testimony is over¬ 
whelming that abstainers are comparatively safe 
in epidemics of cholera. 

I used often to be asked why beer-drinking 
nations are so much more healthful and less 





THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 


263 


inclined to drunkenness than the nations that use 
no beer. Before I went abroad I did not know 
how to answer this, now I can answer it by say¬ 
ing that the question implies that which has no 
foundation in fact. Beer-drinking is not con¬ 
ducive to health in any country, and drunken¬ 
ness prevails wherever beer is used. I saw more 
intoxication among both men and women in 
beer-drinking England than I ever saw in 
America, and a six months’ stay in the homes of 
English families proves to me that they suffered 
in health from this cause. 

Dr. Kerr says : “Beer-drinkers are especially 
liable to structural alteration and enlargement of 
the liver, often complicated with dropsy, rheu¬ 
matism, and gout. Among the consequences of 
beer-drinking are an impeded and loaded circu¬ 
lation, embarrassed respiration, functional per¬ 
version, hepatic and renal congestion, with a 
stupor tending toward paralysis, and a dimin¬ 
ished vitality which invites disease and easily 
succumbs to its ravages.” He also adds that 
beer-drinking has, in the long run, a depressing 
effect tending to melancholy, sometimes ending 
in suicide. This is certainly not a very good 
recommend for beer. 

The cultivation of vineyards and the manu¬ 
facture of wines are advocated by some as a 
means of preventing drunkenness, but observa- 



264 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


tion of wine-drinking in various countries proves 
this to be a mistake. All wines have a greater 
or less amount of alcohol in them, and many 
wines are made so strong by the addition of an 
extra quantity of alcohol that they are almost 
equal to distilled liquors. They tend to the pro¬ 
duction of all the diseases which alcohol can 
produce. 

I found in countries where drinking is common 
among all classes that a prejudice exists against 
total abstinence. It was thought an evidence of 
a weak brain if a person could not ‘ ‘ drink or let 
it alone ” as he pleased; we find, however, that 
the strong brain is the one that is not poisoned 
by alcohol. Many a man imagines that he can 
stop drinking till he makes the effort, and then 
learns that his will-power is so weakened that he 
is not his own master. Alcohol is a most effec¬ 
tual destroyer of the power of self-control. As 
Dr. Kerr says, ‘ ‘ The shiftless, unstable victim is 
tossed about on the ocean of inebriate excitation 
like a rudderless ship in a storm.” It is- the 
strong man who refrains, the weak man who 
yields. 

Alcohol is sometimes taken under the suppo¬ 
sition that it increases mental power, and it is 
true that by the paralysis of the nerves that con¬ 
trol the blood vessels, a greater amount of blood 




THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD . 


265 


will pass to the brain and there will be a tem¬ 
porary increase of activity, though, in reality, 
the quality of work is often found to be below 
par. At this time there may be excitement or 
even brilliancy, which may increase until it 
reaches frenzy or delirium, but as we have al¬ 
ready learned, an organ cannot be nourished by 
stagnant blood, and this increased quantity of 
blood carried to the brain and remaining there 
leaves the brain without nourishment, and the 
“brilliancy dies away, the memory fades, speech 
is thickened, voluntary movements cease, sensa¬ 
tion is dulled, and conscience fails.” Now, of 
course, the intellect is weakened, and the moral 
sense is lessened. The man does not feel 
keenly, and will not realize the extent of injury 
done to him. His perception of truth and jus¬ 
tice and morality is gone and he may murder his 
wife or children while in this condition, and be 
horrified at the deed when he is restored to his 
normal state. 

In our study of the telegraph, we saw that 
certain parts of the brain control certain por¬ 
tions of the body, and it is now conceded that 
one part of the brain is intimately connected 
with the digestive apparatus in the recognition 
of the necessity for food. This brain center, re¬ 
peatedly irritated and poisoned, creates a de- 



266 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


praved appetite which calls for the paralyzing 
effect of the same substance that has produced 
the evil. If the use of alcoholic liquors is begun 
in youth, the effect is just so much the more 
injurious ; and we have the testimony that in 
beer drinking countries the habit of alcoholic 
liquors among children is continued even to the 
production of drunkenness. 

So alarming has been the increase of drunken¬ 
ness among children attending school in Austria, 
that the Vienna school-board have been making 
an effort to induce the government to prohibit 
the sale of liquors to children under fifteen. 

In England, it is reported that children of 
seven years old have been treated for delirium 
tremens. Dr. Kerr relates several cases of de¬ 
lirium among children, saying that babies of not 
more than two years of age would cry for their 
daily allowance of spirits. He also asserts that 
the use of wines for breakfast and dinner by 
children is leading to inebriety. 

Everything that lessens nutrition and de¬ 
presses physical powers paves the way to in¬ 
dulgence in alcohol. So, bad air, impure food, 
overwork, and mental strain may be classed as 
provocative of the use of alcohol. On the other 
hand, we may enumerate pure air, good food, 
cheerful surroundings, and exercise as among the 




THE FOE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 


267 


most valuable remedies, and better still as pre¬ 
ventives. 

The loss to the nation through alcohol can 
scarcely be estimated. We are told that in the 
United States one hundred thousand persons die 
every year as drunkards. It is calculated that 
for every death there are fifty cases of illness. 
Add to this the loss of life resulting from the 
frenzy of intoxication ; from the inefficiency of 
drunken men in responsible positions ; of chil¬ 
dren mutilated or crippled or smothered acci¬ 
dentally by drunken parents, and the loss becomes 
appalling. 

The extravagant expenditure of money is also 
a question seriously to be considered. It is esti¬ 
mated that nine hundred million dollars a year 
is expended in the purchase of alcoholic bever¬ 
ages, and that it costs the United States not 
less than sixty million dollars a year to sup¬ 
port pauperism and crime, produced mostly by 
alcohol. Penitentiaries, reformatories, jails, and 
inebriate asylums are all sources of expenditure 
which would be greatly lessened if total absti¬ 
nence prevailed. I shall only be able to indicate 
in these pages a very small amount of the actual 
evils caused by the use of alcohol. 

If some man came into our house, no matter 
how elegantly dressed or with what polished 



268 


OUR BODILY DWELLING. 


manners, and at once began a destruction of our 
most'precious treasures, even of our dwelling it¬ 
self, it would not take us very long to rid our¬ 
selves of the intruder. When we look over the 
charges brought against this titled adventurer, 
King Alcohol, when we see that from the very 
first moment of his entering our bodily dwelling 
he begins his work of destruction and continues 
it in all parts of the body, tearing down, de¬ 
stroying, paralyzing, and utterly ruining, would 
we not be showing ourselves wise if we set our¬ 
selves firmly to oppose the admission of Alcohol 
in every disguise, never suffering ourselves to be 
deceived by his pretentions, but accepting as 
true the Biblical statement, “Wine is a mocker, 
strong drink is raging ; and whosoever is deceived 
thereby is not wise ” ? 





INDEX. 


Page. 


Abdomen. 18 

Absorption of food. 66 

by the lacteals. 66 

Absinthe.218 

Air, atmospheric, compo¬ 
sition of. 95 

changes in respiration 93 

complemental. 94 

residual. 94 

reserve. 94 

tidal. 94 

natural purification of 96 

Air-cells. 94 

number of. 96 

Albumen, action of alco¬ 
hol on. 253 

Albuminoids. 59, 196 

Alcohol. 243 

produced by decompo¬ 
sition . 245 

effectof on membranes 249 

on corpuscles. 251 

on nerves of capil¬ 
laries . 254 

brain. 258 

heart. 256 

kidneys and liver.. 257 
mental powers.... 265 

pepsin..253 

sensation.....254 


Page. 

Alcohol .—Coni hitied. 

effect of on stomach 252 

heat of body. 255 

testimony of Arctic ex¬ 


plorers concerning. 254 
testimonyof physicans 

concerning. 253 

diseases produced by 259 
use of by children... 266 
loss to the nation 

through. 267 

not a food. 248 

checks waste.259 

Anvil. 160 

Aorta. 72 

Arachnoid membrane.... 45 

Arteries. 76 

movements of blood 

through. 77 

Attitude. 29 

Aura. 14 

Auricles of the heart. 71 

Bathing, rules for. 36 

Beer.262 

Bile, secretion of. 62 

function of indigestion 62 

Blood. 75 

absorption of oxygen 77 
change of in respi¬ 
ration.86, 92 

[269] 









































270 


INDEX. 


Blood.— Continued. 

color of. 77 

corpuscles of. 77 

coagulation of. 78 

circulation of. 78 

exposure to air in 

lungs. 93 

fibrin of. 77 

Blood corpuscles. 77 

movement of in capil¬ 
laries . 78 

Body, temperature of . . 101 

Bones, number of. 17 

formation of. 21 

composition of. 20 

uses of. 17 

Brain. 47 

cranial... 123 

abdominal. 123 

motor area of. 116 

cells of. 114 

convolutions of. 48 

membranes of. 45 

structure of. 47 

nerves of. 115 

Breathing. 93 

diaphragmatic. 89 

Bronchial tubes. 86 

Camera, the photographic 143 

Capillaries. . 77 

circulation in. 78 

Casein. 59 

Cells... 80 

work of. 82 

Cerebro-spinal nervous sys¬ 
tem . 115 


Cerebrum. 48 

office of. 119 

Cerebellum. 48 

a regulator. 120 

office of. 119,126 

Chamber of Envy. 186 

Hatred. 185 

Love. 187 

Peace..... 185 

Selfishness. 186 

Chloral hydrate. 217 

Chords, vocal. 167 

Choroid coat of the eye.. 145 

Cigarettes.221 

Cholera produced by alco¬ 
hol . 262 

Chyle. 65 

Clock, the wonderful .... 122 

Cocaine. 218 

Caecum. 68 

Colon. 67 

Color, how produced. 156 

Color-blindness. 157 

Cochlea of ear. 161 

Coffee, effects of. 208 

use of by children ... 210 

Condiments. 203 

Conjunctiva. 140 

Convolutions of brain .... 48 

Cornea. 145 

Corpuscles of blood. 77 

Cupola, the. 43 

Deceitful friend, a.220 

Diaphragm. 89 

• action of in breathing 89 
Dining-room, the. 63 






























































INDEX. 


271 


Drum of ear. 

Ductless glands. 

Duodenum. 

Dura Mater. 

Ear. 

tympanum of. 

bones of. 

Eggs. 

Elasticity of muscle. 

Electrical apparatus, the.. 

Endosmosis. 

Epiglottis.*. 

Eustachian tube. 

Exercise. 

Exosmosis. 

Extensors. 

Eye, a camera. 

blind-spot of.. . 

choroid coat of. 

retina of. 

sclerotic coat of. 

Fermentation. 

Fibers, muscular. 

Fibrin of the blood. 

Flexors . 

Foe of the household .... 
Food, action of saliva on. 
of gastric juice on... 
of pancreatic juice on 

of liver on. 

intestinal juice on .. . 

Framework, the. 

Force-pump, the. 

Fruits. 

Function of bones. 

muscles. 


Function.— Continued. 

teeth. 51 

gastric juice. 56 

pancreatic juice. 61 

villi. 65 

intestinal juice. 64 

bile. 106 

blood-corpuscles. 77 

lungs. 87 

heart. 71 

retina. 144 

Ganglia of spinal cord ... 115 
of sympathetic nerves 124 

Gases, oxygen. 95 

carbonic acid. 92 

diffusion of. 95 

Gastric juice. 56 

Glands, definition of. 100 

salivary. 54 

perspiratory. 34 

pineal and pituitary.. no 

ductless. hi 

thyroid and thymus.. in 

Gluten. 59 

Glycogen. 106 

Gray matter of brain .... 48 

Gustatory sense. 54 

Hair.!. 41 

Hammer. 160 

Hearing, sense of. 133 

range of. 164 

Heart.!. 70 

capacity of. 7 2 

cavities of. 71 

location of. 69 

work of. 72 


159 

hi 

61 

45 

159 

j 59 

160 

196 

26 

114 

100 

85 

159 

99 

100 

28 

143 

150 

145 

144 

145 

246 

26 

77 

28 

243 

56 

59 

61 

105 

64 

17 

69 

197 

17 

23 
































































272 


INDEX ; 


Heart.— Continued. 

rest of . 

valves of. 

Heat, source of. 

exercise produces.... 
digestion produces... 
thought produces.... 
Heating apparatus, the... 

Helpful guests . 

Housekeeper’s closets, the 

Ilium./.. 

Incisors. 

Internal ear. 

Intestinal juice. 

Intestines, small. 

villi of. 

large . 

Iris. 

Jejunum. 

Jugular vein . 

Juice, gastric. 

intestinal. 

pancreatic. 

Kitchen, the. 

Laboratory. 

Lacteals. 

Larynx, the. 86, 

Library, the. 

Lime in bones. 

Liver . 

work of.:_ 

Lungs . . 

capacity of. 

Lymph... 

Lymphatic gland. 

vessels. 


Medulla oblongata. 128 

Membranes, mucous. 51 

passage of fluids 

through. 100 

Memory, a library. 172 

a picture gallery. 182 

cultivation of. 176 

rules for improve¬ 
ment of. 179 

of senses. 178 

Mesentery, the. 66 

Milk. 195 

Molars. 52 

Mouth. 50 

Mucous membranes. 51 

Muscles, strength of.... . 25 

properties of. 25 

irritability of. 25 

elasticity of. 26 

contractility of. 24 

flexor and extensor .. 28 

Muscular fibers. 26 

Muscular sense.. 138 

Music room, the. 158 

Nasal fossae. 85 

Nerves. 114 

of njotion. 115 

of sensation.. 119 

Nerve force, rapidity of .. 120 
Nervous system, cerebro¬ 
spinal. 115 

office of. 123 

sympathetic, office of 123 
Nervous fibers, motor .... 115 

Net-work, capillary. 78 

Nicotine. 222 


73 

71 

97 

99 

99 

100 

97 

193 

108 

63 

52 

162 

64 

65 

65 

67 

142 

63 

67 

56 

64 

61 

56 

103 

66 

166 

172 

21 

ICO 

105 

88 

96 

84 

66 

67 






























































INDEX . 


273 


Nicotine.— Continued. 

effect of on blood.. .. 

on heart. 

Office, the general. 

Opium. 

Orchestrion, the. 

Organic substances as food 

Osmosis. . 

Ossification. 

Otoliths. 

Oxygen. 

Pain, a friend. 

Pancreas. 

Pancreatic juice, uses of.. 

Palate, soft. 

Papillae of the tongue... . 

Pelvis. 

Pericardium. 

Peristaltic action. 

of stomach. 

of bowels. 

Perspiration, uses of. 

insensible.. 

amount of. 

Perspiratory glands, length 

of. 

Pharynx. 

Phosphorus. 

Pia mater. 

Picture gallery, the. 

Pigment of skin. 

Pineal gland. 

Pitch of voice. 

Pituitary body.. 

Pleura . 

Plexus . 

18 


Plumbing, the. 33 

Pons varolii. 126 

Pulse, frequency of. 70 

Pupil of eye. 141 

Purifying apparatus, the.. 85 

Pylorus. 58 

Receptaculum chyli. 66 

Reception Room and Hall 50 

Red corpuscles. 77 

Regulator and Mainspring, 

the. 126 

Repose, need of. 70 

Reserve air. 94 

Residual air. 94 

Respiration. 89 

changes of blood in.. 92 

frequency of. 93 

Retina. 144 

Rhythmic action of organs 124 

Round shoulders. 30 

Saliva, action on starch .. 54 

Salivary glands. 54 

Salts. 198 

Schneiderian membrane.. 85 

Sclerotic coat of eye. 145 

Semi-circular canals. 160 

Senses, sight. 132 

taste. 134 

smell. 135 

hearing. 133 

touch. 133 

Sense, muscular. 138 

Servants, the. 80 

Sheathing. 38 

Sight, sense of. 132 

mechanism of. 147 


224 

226 

47 

215 

165 

59 

ICO 

21 

161 

194 

215 

62 

61 

55 

134 

18 

7 i 

124 

56 

124 

34 

34 

35 

34 

55 

198 

45 

182 

39 

no 

168 

IIO 

88 

123 































































274 


INDEX. 


Sight.— Continued. 

attributes of objects 

by. 154 

Skin, structure and use of 40 

coloring of. 39 

Smell, sense of. 135 

Sound, how produced ... 163 
Sound-vibrations, rapidity 

of. 164 

Special Watchmen. 132 

Spicy Visitors. 202 

Spinal column. 18 

Spinal cord. 114 

nerves of. 115 

Spleen. 112 

supposed office of .. . 113 
Starch, digestion of in 

mouth. 54 

Stirrup. 160 

Sternum. 18 

Store-room, the. 61 

Stomach, coats of. 56 

secretion of. 56 

action of. 56 

structure of. 56 

temperature of. 57 

Sweat ghinds. 34 

Sugar, formation of in 

liver. 106 

Supra-renal capsules.ill 

Sympathetic nervous sys¬ 
tem, origin of .... 123 

Taj Mahal. 16 

Taste, sense of. 54 

where located. 134 

Tea, effects of. 211 


Tears, uses of. 141 

Teeth, development of.. . 52 

care of. 53 

Thatch, the. 41 

Thoracic duct. 67 

Thorax. 18 

Throat. 55 

Tidal air. 94 

Tobacco. 221 

effects of on blood.. . 225 

ears. 229 

eyes.228 

heart. 226 

intellect. 230 

morals. 232 

nerves. 227 

lungs. 224 

throat. 229 

what science says of. 221 
Tobacco-habit, breaking 

off. 237 

of girls. 238 

cost of.239 

Tone. 168 

loudness of. 168 

pitch of. 168 

duration of. 16S 

quality of.. 169 

Tongue, nerves of. 134 

Tonsils. no 

Touch, sense of. 134 

Trachea. 86 

Treacherous companions. 214 

Tympanum. 159 

Uvula. 55 

Valves of the heart. 71 





























































INDEX. 


275 


Veins. 76 

Vegetarians. 200 

Vena cavse ascendens. ... 76 

descendens. 76 

Venous blood, changes in 

respiration. 92 

Velocity of blood in arter¬ 
ies. 78 

capillaries. 78 

Ventricles of heart. 71 

Vestibule of internal ear.. 160 


Vibration of air-waves.... 163 

vocal chords... 167 

Villi of intestines. 65 

Vitreous humor. 144 

Vocal chords. 168 

Voice, range of. 170 

Walls and machinery .... 23 

Water. 197 

proportion of in food 60 

in body. 60 

White corpuscles. 113 

Windows. 140 



















particulars, write for circular 




.IBook s ^ 



MARY WOOD-ALLEN, M. D. 


TEACHING TRUTH. Price 25 cents. 

This little brochure aims to answer in chaste and scientific language the 
queries of children as to the origin of life. The reception it has met with is 
best indicated by the testimonials received from the press and through pri¬ 
vate letters. 

The principal of a young ladies’ school writes: “ I invited our girls to 
the parlor and read your brochure which was listened to with the deepest in¬ 
terest. At certain portions of the reading nearly all were in tears. It is a 
most pathetically pure, chaste presentation on a grand subject. You would 
have rejoiced could you have heard the expressions from the young ladies. 
Surely, dear Dr. Allen, God has blessed many through your instrumentality.” 

Emma Bates, Valley City, N. D.: “Read this book if you read no other 
but the Bible this year.” 

Frances E. Williard: “Please send me some more copies of your unique 
and valuable little book. I cannot keep a copy over night.” “ It would be 
an evangel to every young person in whose hands it might be placed. I 
would also invite the public school teachers to examine this rare little book.” 

“ A skillful, graceful, and reverent effort to assist parents in what has 
been a delicate and difficult task. The author deserves the praise that be¬ 
longs to the successful pioneer.”— George N. Miller. 

CHILD=CONFIDENCE REWARDED. Price 10 

cents. 

“This little book treats of child-purity with the same delicate but mas¬ 
terly hand shown in Dr. Allen’s other writings.”— Union Signal of July 5, 
1894. 

“ Unique and valuable.”—Frances E. Willard. 

“I am delighted with it.”—Katherine Lente Stevenson, Chicago. 

“Most charmingly written.”—Alice B. Stockham, M. D., Chicago. 

“ The good it will do is incalculable.”—Emily S. Bouton in Toledo Blade. 

“ The best you have done yet. I can recommend it.”— Earl Barnes, pro¬ 
fessor in Leland Stanford University, Palo Alto, Cal. 

ALMOST A MAN. Price 25 cents. 


The success of the “ Teachiug Truth ” and “ Child-Confidence Rewarded ” 
together with the frequent requests for some inexpensive book for the 
instruction of boys approaching manhood has led to the writing of “ Almost 
a Man.” It is intended to help mothers and teachers in the delicate task of 
teaching the lad concerning himself, purely and yet with scientific accuracy. 

A booklet designed to help mothers and teachers In the instruction of 
boys. Testimonials of some who have read the manuscript: — 

“Please publish it at once. We need it.”—Mrs. Dora Webb, Ohio State 
Supt. Purity Dep’t, W. C. T. U. 

“ Admirable.”—Cora L. Stockham. 

“The best on the subject I have ever seen.”—Dr. Kate Cory, Barberton, 
Ohio. 

“A most needed and helpful book.”—Mrs. J. H. Kellogg, Battle Creek, 
Mich. 

At Bookstores or orders .promtly filled by 

The Wood-Men Pub. To., inn Mor,m 






















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